


Jump Starting the Tardis

by amelia



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Aztec Myths & Legends, Gen, Mystery, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-24
Updated: 2013-08-12
Packaged: 2017-12-16 02:19:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 29,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/856639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amelia/pseuds/amelia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Tardis' power gets discharged, leaving the Doctor and crew stranded in the Aztec jungle.  Once they escape, they follow a trail of radiation and time-tracks to a new planet, where some mysteries from their future begin to converge.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Amy Pond sat on the steps of the Tardis in the main console room, watching hot rain fall outside the open door. The steam crept in around her legs.

“Come on, you old girl,” the Doctor purred to the Tardis console, trying to get the stubborn machine running. “You sexy thing!” 

“Cajoling her won’t work,” River called from her patio chair on the other side of the room.

“How can you be so calm, River?” Amy said. “We’ve been stuck here half a day, in a jungle. Who knows what year?”

River adjusted the pink hibiscus flower in her hair. “Maybe some rest and air is all the Tardis—and we—need.”

The lights dimmed and the Tardis’ whirr dropped into a low groan.

“Oh, no,” Amy said, standing up.

“The generator’s stopped,” the Doctor said. “She’s fizzed out like flat coke!”

Outside, a yell pierced the Aztec jungle.

“Rory!” Amy said, running to the door. “Rory!”

\----

Not far off, candlelight glinted from the mouth of a cave. Inside, four hooded clerics prepared a ritual on a plinth at the cave’s center. They set a gold key on top of a skull and shuffled around it slowly. 

“Goddess of power. Goddess of energy,” one chanted.

“God of light. God of time,” another intoned.

“Dark one from ages past,” the third entreated.

“Oh bright one.” The fourth painted Aztec symbols on the walls.

“Great beast of the future.” The first waved bones.

“Collect here today,” they all called, raising their hands in the air.

The skull rattled, filling with light. A whirring sound like the Tardis filled the chamber.

And from the cave’s mouth, a man peered in. Rory.

\---

The Doctor paced around the Tardis as usual, oblivious to anything but his own thoughts. “But think! How did they discharge the capacitors?”

“Where exactly are we?” River asked.

“Southern Mexico; Aztec Empire; 732 A.D. Hardly important.”

River walked over to him and leaned on the console. “We were floating in the time vortex, then skidded to a halt. Perhaps someone dragged us here.”

“Possibly, someone disabled her transformers and hacked into the vector field, to tap the energy flow,” mused the Doctor.

“And then she got stuck,” River added. “Whoever did this must be close by.”

“Much as I love listening to your wild speculations,” Amy called from the doorway, “I’m going to look for Rory.”

“Rory?” The Doctor looked around.

River smiled at him. “He went looking for supplies while you were puttering.”

“But the Tardis provides everything we could possibly need, want, or imagine.”

“Exactly,” said River Song. “But she’s about to lose power entirely if you keep messing with all the controls.”

“Oh dear, the refrigerators,” the Doctor said, as he slumped into the console. Then he jumped up. “I’ve got to check her external insulators.”

Abruptly, he darted outside. The Tardis’ paint was faded and the wood cracked along the grain. The Doctor scanned along the box with his screwdriver and watched its green lights blink and fade.

“The electromagnetic field destabilized,” he muttered. “Peeled off like the skin of an onion.”

A rustling in the nearby brush caught his attention, and for the first time he looked out over the hillside, across a magnificent jungle dotted with stone structures. The sky was stormy. “Got some cowboys here,” the Doctor said.

Nearby on the rocky ground, a small handheld radio crackled to life. Men’s voices poured out in a rush of syllables. The Doctor knelt down to look. A yell burst through the speakers, and the Doctor jumped.

The bushes rattled again, and Rory stumbled back into the clearing, his hair disheveled and his face streaked in dirt. 

The Doctor twirled around. “Don’t you look absurd!” He exclaimed, pulling twigs out of Rory’s shirt. 

“There’s--But there’s hooded creatures in a cave down there,” Rory stuttered.

The Doctor looked out over the jungle. “Ah, humans. So unable to keep yourselves out of trouble.”

“They had bones and a skull. There was chanting.”

“And let me guess--some key or ring, possibly a sacrifice,” the Doctor said.

“How did you know?” Rory exclaimed.

“The real question is, how do we power the Tardis? And where is Amy? She went looking for you. And, what’s a radio doing here?”

Just then, River came bounding out of the Tardis door. “Want to fly a kite, Doctor?” She held out a large kite with a long red ribbon.

“My kite!” exclaimed the Doctor. “I’ve been meaning to take you all kite flying at the Wishbone Dunes--lovely sand planet--great sand-whales, too.“

“That was a good time!” River said.

The Doctor shot her a look, but she just shrugged. “Back to front, my love.”

“Still—why fly now?” he asked. “Kites and skulls and chanting—I’d like to humor you lot, but we’ve got to fix the Tardis.”

“Don’t you remember Ben Franklin?” asked River.

The Doctor’s face lit up in another lightning flash. “Yes!” he said. “Printer, activist, inventor! Had a thing for keys!” He dashed back in the Tardis and emerged two minutes later with twine and a key.

River helped him tie the key to the kite. “Teamwork, sweetie,” she grinned.

The Doctor smiled at her. 

“You’ll be careful,” she said.

“Not likely.” The Doctor laughed, grabbing the kite and looking up at the Tardis. “Wooo—eeee! We’re going to ride the lightning storm back into time!”

\--

Captain Jack Harkness awoke gasping, tangled in a tree. A large snake was staring at him and didn’t much care for him. Jack shrieked and fell out of the tree onto a bush below. His watch fell on his chest. He checked the display, but the watch was dead.

He was out of time.

“Damn,” he yelled at the jungle. He started walking up the hill.

Amy Pond was wandering down the same path. The trees overhead grew thicker, and she wondered if her Stupid-Face Rory had wandered off the trail. He was noble, and brave, and so likely to get himself killed.

The further she walked, the more the jungle wrapped around her with its darkness. She didn’t see Captain Jack until they nearly collided.

“Oh my God!” he jumped as he saw her.

“What the--hell-ooo.”

Jack caught his breath first. “Wasn’t expecting to run into anyone quite so beautiful here!”

Amy frowned and pointed at him. “Did you happen to scream a while back?” 

“Probably,” Captain Jack said. “My watch got a power surge and zapped me.”

“Your watch?”

“Long story.”

“My ship lost power and landed on that hill.”

“Your ship?”

“Well, plane. Well, spaceship. Bit hard to explain.”

Captain Jack’s eyes widened. “You’re from the future.”

“So are you,” observed Amy, walking around him and straightening his blue coat. “I’m looking for a boy, a nurse--blond hair, awkward face?”

Captain Jack shook his head, “Only creature I’ve seen is a snake in a tree back there. Mean bugger.”

“I’d better keep looking then.”

“So a nurse—not the Doctor, then?”

“You said _the_ Doctor. You know the Doctor?”

“Ahaha. Ha! I knew it!” Captain Jack threw his head back and laughed. “Your ship’s the Tardis!”

“You broke the Tardis?” Amy said. “You pulled us from space and the timey wimey vortex and landed us in this forest? For a watch?”

“Time watch.” Jack held out his wrist to show her. “Tried to reboot the temporal connection by fixing to the rift, but the charge was too strong. Didn’t count on the Tardis flying so low.”

“Well, you’ll help me find Rory, then.” 

“Your nurse?”

“My husband. He’s a nurse. Rory Williams. Rory Williams Pond.”

“Jack Harkness,” Jack held out a hand.

Amy took it. “And I’m Amy.”

“Amy Pond. The Doctor’s latest…companion?”

“One of.”

“Ha! Can’t wait to see him again!” Jack jumped up and down. “This way?” He gestured up the path.

“But Rory—“

“Doctor’s rule: don’t wander off,” Jack shrugged.

“Right.“

“Rory Pond!” Jack’s voice boomed through the trees. “If you want your wife back—“

“Rory, where are you?” called Amy, following Jack back uphill.

“Rory!” The mountain shook with thunder.

\---

The Doctor was tying his kite to the top lantern on the Tardis. Inside at the console, River flipped switches to prepare for the Frankenstein jolt she hoped would restart the time machine.

That left Rory sitting on the ground outside, more or less alone, to ruminate. Where was Amy and how many different ways could she have died in the jungle already? After 2,000 years of vigilance, he’d wandered off and left her. He really deserved being called Stupid Face. 

The radio on the ground next to him burst to life with voices. All he could make out were sounds and syllables. From the static, he started to make out words. One familiar word. “Rory!”

“Oh, God!” he shuddered.

“Rory Pond! If you want your wife back--”

Rory jumped to his feet. “Amy!”

River ran out of the Tardis just then. “It’s ready, Doctor!” She called. “Are you done yet?”

“Ah! Just in time!” the Doctor called. He unfurled the kite and let it soar up into the sky. Then he looked back down just as Jack and Amy stepped into the clearing.

The Doctor waved to them. “Jack Harkness! Care to catch a Time Lord?”

“Just what I wanted!” yelled Captain Jack as the Doctor leaped on top of him. “Aw, crap!”

The two of them fell onto the ground in a pile, groaning and yelling.

“I already died once today,” Captain Jack said as they both clambered back to their feet. “Was that really necessary?”

The Doctor scrambled up to watch the kite unfurl. Its red ribbon flashed in the wind. He clapped Jack on the back. “Next time I promise a proper greeting,” he said.

“I’ll take a more pleasant improper greeting.” Captain Jack appraised the Doctor. “You’re shorter than last time. Cool bow tie.”

“See,” the Doctor told Amy, “he thinks bow ties are cool.”

“Nope. He doesn’t,” she responded. She traded a knowing eyebrow-raise with Jack, deciding she liked him after all.

The Doctor wasn’t listening. “Now stand back. Amy, good to see you. I told you lot not to wander off, but you’re all here now, so that’s good. Very good. Now, everyone stand back.” He rubbed his hands together and called to the sky. “Zeus, we’d like a spare lightning bolt!”

Not long after, lightning arced across the sky, down through the kite and its key, then into the lantern above the Police Box. The windows shattered and red light exploded from the doorway.

Everything turned suddenly dark.

“No, no, no! No, no.” the Doctor said. “No!”

“Damn,” said Rory. They all blinked, trying to adjust.

The Doctor grabbed Jack’s wrist. “What time is it?”

“Hey, buy me a drink first before you grab me in the dark.”

“Your time watch,” the Doctor said, pointing his screwdriver at it.

“Dead,” Jack said. “I was mining the rift for power, but I got more than I bargained for.” 

“You got me!” said the Doctor. “But I hate it when you break my toys.” He flipped the screwdriver open to analyze the results. “Power surge on the same wavelength as the Tardis. Either you brought us here, or we were both zapped by the same force.” 

“Afraid this one’s my fault,” Jack said. “Sorry, folks.”

“Ah yes, introductions,” said the Doctor. “Here’s River and Rory and Amy. And he’s quite dangerous, this one. Jack Harkness.”

“Pleasure to meet you,” Jack smiled.

“The pleasure’s all mine.” River took a step toward him.

“Woah, hey, ooh!” The Doctor waved his screwdriver between them. “No!”

“Oh, don’t be a spoil sport,” said River. “We’ve already met, haven’t we, Jack?”

“Hardly an adventure I could forget.”

“Look, Doctor!” Amy grabbed his arm and pointed. The Tardis started to flicker and glow again. Tendrils of light arced out from core to ceiling, splintering across the walls.

“That’s beautiful,” Rory said.

“It’s the Tardis’ energy core, like a giant Tesla coil,” River explained. “The voltage is too high. Doctor, you need to repair those insulators and transformers.”

The Doctor pointed his screwdriver in the door and started blasting the console. “Easy, girl,” he said. The lightning tendrils dimmed, while the overall glow of the Tardis brightened. The machine whirred back to life.

But the Tardis’ core turned whiter and whiter.

“No!” called Jack. The excess power gathering in the console suddenly arced back to the screwdriver. Jack jumped to grab the sonic from the Doctor.

Jack got his hands on the screwdriver just as the electric charge blasted through it. The radiation wave sent Jack flailing backward, as the Doctor fell and rolled to safety.

The Doctor stood up and winced at Jack’s plight. “That’s got to hurt.” He wiped his hands together to get the dirt off.

“Don’t—don’t touch him,” Rory called. His nurse’s instincts kicked in. “Electrical shock. Fourth degree burns--he’s probably dead with that kind of charge.“

“He’s Jack,” River said, stepping in. “He’ll be fine.”

They all huddled around Jack’s lifeless body. 

“So, you do know him,” the Doctor said.

“Better than you think.”

“Should I be jealous?” the Doctor said, raising an eyebrow.

“Everyone stand back,” River said. She held up her wrist. She was wearing an anti-static wristband that protected her from electric shock. She leaned down and stroked Jack’s thigh. His leg sparked. River touched him again after a moment. There were no more sparks. “He’s safe now.”

“Good,” said the Doctor. “Rory, River, take him inside. I’ll tend the Tardis.”

River huddled on the Tardis’ floor with Jack, while the Doctor spun around the console, flicking switches, checking monitors, and stroking dials.

Soon, Jack gasped back to life. 

“What?” asked Amy. “He was dead a minute ago.”

 

“You!” He pointed at her, spluttering. “You’re bad luck. Twice in one day.” 

“I couldn’t find a pulse,” Rory said.

“It’s a bad habit. I always wake up.” 

“That’s handy,” said Amy.

Jack tried to stand up, and River and Amy helped him to his feet. “How is she, Doctor?” Jack asked.

“There’s some damage, but she’ll fly,” the Doctor said. “Good work, Jack. My hearts couldn’t have taken that, I don’t think.”

“Glad to be of service.” Jack stood up on his own, and River and Amy stepped away. “So, one good turn deserves another. What do you say?”

“I say we’re even,” the Doctor said. “You broke my Tardis. Then you fixed her, so I’ll call that even.”

“Doctor,” Amy said, “I think he’s hoping for a ride, since he saved your life.”

“I’m sure we can find a spare room for him, Doctor,” said River. “Possibly mine.”

“I guess you owe me a favor then, mate,” the Doctor said to Jack. “I think we can find you your very own room.” He shot a glance to River, who grinned and shrugged back at him.

“Hey, er,” Rory said, “welcome to the raggedy doctor family.”

“Can’t think of a place I would rather be,” said Jack, clapping Rory on the back. “Feeling a bit raggedy myself today.”

Before Jack could ask for a clean shirt, the Tardis whirred back to life.

“Here she goes!” crowed the Doctor.

\---

As the Tardis spun back into the time vortex, one particular skull in one particular cave near the mountain filled with light. The skull started to tremble, then suddenly shattered. Shards fell at the feet of the four clerics still in attendance.

They fell into silence. One of them nudged a piece of the skull with his foot and then they started to chatter in an ancient tongue, the language of the Aztecs, Nahuatl:

“Too bad,” said the first cleric as he nudged the skull.

“I guess the ritual’s power was just too strong for us,” said the second.

“Better luck next time, eh?”

“That’s the last time I try that blasted spell.”

“I’m starving. Let’s get some lunch.”

And with that, they tossed their robes on the ground and trudged out of the cave.

They left so quickly that they didn’t notice the key at the edge of the plinth glowing with its own light. They didn’t see the stalactites dropping into place around the plinth, and the lightning bolts shooting up from the key to the ceiling. As they hiked down the mountain, they didn’t see those shards of the skull whirr to life, raising and lowering within the core, from plinth to ceiling, like molecules collecting energy.

They missed the birth of a new Tardis.

 

 _to be continued_...


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I started this story about 2 years ago. The first chapter stood alone, but then turned into the beginning of a larger plot arc, attempting to fill in some of the plot holes of Season 5. This takes place somewhere around S05E01, Impossible Astronaut. This chapter introduces some OCs, but don't worry, our Doctor, Captain and the Ponds will return in the next chapter. Thanks for reading.

He might just as well be crazy, Crow told himself as he watched the flames of his new fire crackle to life, sucking the moisture out of twigs and the lizard he’d skewered for dinner.

His guides had left him deep in the jungle here in southern Mexico, explaining in fearful, broken English they couldn’t go further. No one traversed these mountains. Too rough. Too dark. 

Dark with overgrowth or with some mysterious spirits, he couldn’t tell.

He’d come here on holiday, but it was something more--the need for something new, something deeper in life. 

Well, he was in deep all right. Even before the guides had gone, they were running out of food. The burros were about to die of exhaustion. Even he could see that.

But it was hard to reach the sensible part of his brain anymore, the sense that had made the guides scare off two days ago. No, Crow had been hearing that whirr in his head now going on a week. Hadn’t said a thing to the guides--just that he needed to go this direction. It was coming from over there, beyond that last ridge.

“Nobody goes that direction, Señor,” said the one with the most English. “Just trees. Snakes and spiders. Bad things. Can kill you. Or you starve.”

“I’ll take my chances. Thanks.”

So he took the machete, the last satchel of food, and an extra pair of shoes, and attached them all haphazardly on his own pack. He watched the men pick their way back down the mountain, and that night could see the smoke of their fire curling up from behind a distant ridge. And now they were gone-- might have made it back to that little village down the mountain by now, watered the burros, and had a hot meal with beans and rice.

And here he was, listening to the wind, tropical birds, and the snakes in the grass. 

And the whirr, that whirr of something on the peak that meant either his death or salvation. It was making him crazy.

\--

Three days later, he found it. 

Three days, four lizards, a rabbit, some kind of strange jungle squirrel, and whatever berries he could find that matched what the guides had shown him to be edible. The rain had dried up; his canteens were empty. His throat was dry as hot coal.

He was just about hallucinating with hunger and thirst. The ironic thing was he could still hear planes and helicopters overhead, every so often. He couldn’t escape the first world, the sane world, even here in the mountains.

Suddenly the path turned and led him to the mouth of the cave. Suddenly dizzy, he clutched a tree branch to steady himself. The whirr in his head was deafening for a moment. His hands trembled, and when he looked down, they seemed to glow faintly.

His breath caught in his chest and he stumbled to the cave. It was lined with rocky stone, where ages ago, someone had painted ancient symbols. A stalactite of crystal cut through the center of the cave, glowing of its own accord. Dizzy and hungry, he thought the column seemed to wobble and rise, then fall again to shake the hillside. 

He’d completed his pilgrimage. Suddenly, he felt elated. He spun around the console, his breath coming quick and deep. And then his movements turned into a sort of a dance. He felt the energy of the mountains fill him with a rage and ecstasy, and just let his limbs flow with the movement.

His eyes caught on the shards of stone and pebbles around his feet, and he leaned over to gather them. He arranged them on the stone shelf, the base of the whirring crystal. And with just his fingers, he pushed and ground the pebbles into the stone. 

As he moved them, he could see the stars in his head, and charted a course in the sky.

Suddenly, the world tilted and turned dark, and he was tossed to the ground, dizzy and unconscious. His mouth was so dry, all he could think of was the river of water, snaking beneath the mountain.

\--

Crow’s cave careened into a meadow of sorrel and ferns, and he rolled out into the light of a strange sun. The air tingled and a light, brown smog hung above him. 

Gone were the mountains and the jungle – in their place, he was surrounded by trees with barren trunks and sparse, orange leaves fanning out overhead.

He gaped around him, thinking he must have just gone through an earthquake and collapsed, that his vision was impaired from the days of long hiking and starvation. Surely the trees here in Mexico had never been orange?

Yet three miles south, where the forest suddenly gave way to a barren outcropping of rock and desert; deep in a compound surrounded by a high electric fence; and inside, in one of the buildings, all the computer screens suddenly flashed. The displays showed energy levels higher than any of the scientists there had ever seen.

A lone machine began to shriek and siren, until one of the lizard creatures stepped over to turn it down. He looked puzzled. “Black hole’s the same, but on top of the usual signal is something new – energy level’s through the roof, but it’s not coming from up there.”  
His superior officer growled. “Our satellites are all pointed to gather the gamma radiation from that black hole—where else would we get a signal like that from?”

“Looks like—a few miles south of here, sir.”

“In the forest?”

“Yes—yes, sir.”

The man laughed mirthlessly. “You’re telling me—where those backwards, pansy-ass hunter-gatherer types live? Those indolent people who thanked us for coming and saving their lot from the radiation?”

“Who else, sir?”

“They wouldn’t know how to read the screen in front of you, much less create something from all that energy we’re gathering. At the touch of a button, our weapons could destroy their race and hundreds of others besides—“ his voice rose “—Yet you’re telling me, from those simpletons out there, you’re getting an energy signal off the charts?”

The lizard man hesitated, swallowing. “The signals—must have malfunctioned, sir.”

“That’s right. Now fix it--or that new gamma weapon we’re making will get tested on you!”


	3. Chapter 3

Everything was finally, peacefully quiet in the Tardis. River had been dropped off in jail, Jack had gone off to rest, and the Doctor was futzing with the console as they floated through the Time Vortex.

Amy and Rory shared a private kiss under the stairs.

“Want to sneak off to bed?” Amy whispered.

“Absolutely,” Rory answered.

Before they could move, Jack came rushing into the room. “Doctor! Doctor, I’m tingling. All over.”

“Are you?” The Doctor raised an eyebrow and stifled a smile.

“You’re the flirt this time around!” Jack answered, stopping in his tracks. “What does it mean?”

Underneath the console, Amy rolled her eyes.

“I’m getting a reading—“ the Doctor answered. “Gamma radiation and--something. Something distinctly more like time tracks.”

“Time tracks?” Jack raised an eyebrow.

The Doctor pulled some levers. “Like the wake of a boat through waves—pieces of the Vortex sprayed on a planet.”

“Another time agent?” Jack asked.

“Yes,” said the Doctor. “Like another time agent. How many of you are there?”

“Don’t look at me! I gave that up.” Jack shrugged. 

The Doctor pulled some other levers, twisted a dial, and spun around to look at his monitor. The Tardis lurched to a halt.

“We’ve stopped,” said Jack. “What’s outside?”

“We’re on an asteroid. Gamma One,” the Doctor said, but then he frowned, looking puzzled. “But the atmosphere reads as safe.”

He ran to open the Tardis door, and his companions trailed after him. Outside, they found blue grass and colorful trees under a bright sun.

“It’s gorgeous,” said Amy.

The Doctor scanned a tree, then the sky, and squinted at his screwdriver. “There’s a black hole releasing gamma rays that should cut right through this planet’s atmosphere.” He frowned. “But it’s not.”

“What does that mean, Doctor?” asked Jack.

“Someone’s siphoning the gamma rays off somewhere else?” Amy said.

“Where else could they go?” asked Rory.

“Brilliant question,” the Doctor said. “But it doesn’t just feel spacey-wacey here. It’s not just gamma rays. No. It feels timey-wimey, too. The radiation’s coming from over there—“ he pointed in one direction. “And the time tracks are coming from there.” And he pointed the opposite direction. 

He took a step in one direction, then thought better and stepped in the other direction. He scratched his head, then rubbed his hands together.

“What direction do we go?” asked Amy.

The Doctor hesitated. “I don’t know.”

“Take a decision pill already!” said Rory.

The Doctor looked up. “Do you have those?”

“No,” Rory answered. “So tell us what to do.”

Jack stepped up then. “I can handle radiation, Doctor. You’re the time expert.”

“Alright. Check it out. Meet back here.”

“Got it,” Jack said.

“Come along, Pond.” The Doctor grabbed Amy’s hand, only to find it was already in Rory’s.

“Amy Pond!” he said. “Time Tracks. Roronicus Williams, Space Tracks. Rory, go with  
Jack. Amy, this way.”

“But that’s my wife—“ Rory complained.

“That way.” The Doctor pointed imperiously.

Rory looked at Amy, who shrugged an apology and rolled her eyes. So Rory turned and bolted for Jack, who had already taken off in long strides through the grass.

Hearing Rory shuffling toward him, Jack turned and waited. “What are you—the latest tin dog?” he said, once Rory was in earshot.

“What?”

“Never mind.” Jack clapped Rory on the back. “Come on, let’s check out this gamma radiation. And don’t worry—the Doctor treats everyone like that. He abandoned me more than once.” Jack laughed. “But he’s still worth it.”

“That doesn’t matter.” Rory shook his head. “It’s not for the Doctor. I’m here for Amy.”

“I know.” Jack nodded. “I hope she’s worth it, then.”

The trees thinned as they walked, finally opening to a view of more barren landscape--through the ferns and white tree limbs, they could see boulders, sand, and dunes in the distance. 

Half a mile from away, a compound of buildings rose out of the rocks and sand. “What’s that?” blurted Rory.

“Could be an army base or settlement,” Jack said, shading his eyes and peering through a set of binoculars he’d pulled from his coat. “Looks like they want to keep the locals out.”

They approached cautiously. Electric and barbed wire hung from the top of the fence, but they could see through into the base. The buildings were spare and utilitarian, with few windows. Out in clear view stood large satellites, their white domes pointing upwards.

Jack held up his hands. “I’m tingling again,” he said. His fingers trembled. “The satellites must be collecting that radiation.” 

Rory felt fine himself, but noticed Jack was flushed and sweating. He turned his attention back into the army base. Aliens swarmed around the buildings in twos and threes, wearing matching uniforms, but they were all different species -- some looked like insects, some like lizards, some like weird monsters out of books and nightmares. 

But the important thing was, “They don’t look armed,” Rory observed.

“Not here anyway,” Jack muttered. “I’m betting they want people to look in and get that impression. But, look through those rows of buildings—“ he pointed toward the center of the compound– “there must be a central area we can’t see. That’s where the soldiers and weapons will be.”

Rory nodded, then said slowly, “So, how do we get in?” 

“Rory Pond.” Jack grinned. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a leather case for tools. “Watch and learn.” 

\---------------------

“It doesn’t feel like a Time Agent, or even a rift,” said the Doctor, pulling Amy along through the strange orange forest. “It almost feels like a Time Lord, but well, that’s impossible. No one can grow Tardises anymore.” 

Amy clung to his hand and tried to follow his every move as they dodged the white trunks of trees. He was rambling again, the way he did when he was nervous and excited--just like every time he caught a reminder of his lost Time Lords.

The sun’s light swept around them through the orange leaves of the trees, turning the Doctor’s coat and hair a reddish hue. Amy tried to distract him by commenting on it. “You’re a ginger here.” She laughed.

“What!?” The Doctor turned around, running his hands through his hair and peering upward, trying to see. 

“The light.” She gestured upwards. “It’s made everything orange--even your hair.”

“Oh,” he seemed unsure. “Don’t you have a mirror?”

“I’m not that kind of girl,” Amy said. “Maybe we’ll find some water to look in.”

“A pond.” The Doctor smiled. “Isn’t that just precisely what I always need.”

They smiled at each other. 

But the Doctor pulled away again. “Do you want to find the time tracks or not?” He kept walking. “There’s not many things that can cause time tracks.”

He kept talking, pulling her along. Amy tried to look around as they rushed forward. She thought she saw small animals scampering around and even a child or two running through the woods, behind the trees and boulders.

Then suddenly, the Doctor stopped running, and she plowed into him. They nearly fell over, and she clutched at his arm to stay upright.

Out through the trees, in an open field, there was a man standing in front of a huge pile of boulders. He looked disheveled and wild, but he was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. From the top of the rock hill grew a pine tree that looked like any Earth tree.

The man was waving his arms about and yelling about an earthquake.

“What is it?” asked Amy, noting how pale the Doctor had become.

“Do you hear that?” the Doctor said. “It’s some kind of time machine. Like a Tardis.”

“You said another Tardis was impossible,” Amy said. “You always say something is like something else, but then you say it’s really nothing like that at all. So what is it then, really?” 

“It’s a Tardis.” The Doctor had already recovered himself and was walking forward into the meadow. “Hello!” he said in his best, friendliest voice with a little wave. “I’m the Doctor and this is Amy. And who’re you, then?”

Crow looked around in a daze and saw the Doctor stride toward him. “I’m Crow, from California. I just came up here to Mexico, to the mountains--” he gestured around, looking confused that there were in fact no mountains around them. “--I followed a sound, from this cave-- and everything’s changed.”

“I see,” the Doctor said, scanning him with the screwdriver. “From Earth, then?”

Crow’s jaw dropped a mile and hung open, and he stood there, silenced, as the Doctor peered around the cave. 

“My guides left me,” Crow explained. “There was an earthquake--I blacked out, and must have fallen--”

“Fallen through space,” said Amy. “You’re on another planet.”

The Doctor scanned the entrance of the Cave Tardis. “How did you do grow her?”

Crow took a few steps back, opening and closing his mouth a few times.

“Doctor--” Amy tried to break in, watching Crow’s confusion. “I don’t think he knows anything.”

“You don’t just walk up a mountain and step on a Tardis,” the Doctor said impatiently. 

“It was calling me,” said Crow. “Humming. I could feel it in the mountain.”

The Doctor “mmhmm”ed and stepped in the cave. The crystal was glowing. “Aahhhh,” the Doctor exhaled, in awe. He rubbed his hands together and shifted the pebbles on the stone plinth. The Tardis quieted, and the central crystal stalactite stopped moving with a large thunk. Using his screwdriver as light, he peered around the cave. 

“Doctor--”

“Not now, Amy,” he said. “Blimey, this place is ancient. Aztec inscriptions on the walls--Earth magic! It must have taken a powerful blast of energy from the Vortex to bring her to life.” 

He suddenly turned pale, thinking of their recent misadventures in the mountains, the lightning strike, and Jack’s fried time watch. “No--can’t be,” he said, rubbing his hands together. 

He reached a hand up to the crystal that held the Tardis’ heart. It felt stuck, like damaged tissue, and couldn’t beat up and down smoothly any longer. 

“It doesn’t have the energy for a second voyage,” he continued, half muttering to himself, half trying to explain his thoughts for Amy. “Besides that, the chassis and the shell—these boulders--were never meant to withstand the Time Vortex. Even if the crystal could manage it, the cave itself would collapse if it were thrown back in the Vortex.”

Crow shook his head. “I’m an engineer, and I don’t know half those words. You’re saying however I’ve gotten here, I can’t go home?”

“Don’t worry.” Amy brushed his elbow. “We’ll get you home.”

Crow shook his head. “I need air.” He stumbled back out of the cave, and Amy followed him. 

“Poor girl,” the Doctor mumbled, still examining the Tardis. 

“Doctor--” Amy called from outside.

“One more thing!” he told her. 

Thoughtfully, he adjusted his screwdriver to code instructions to the Tardis crystal. You couldn’t have just anyone sending a stray Tardis through the Vortex. He’d have to lock it so no more accidents happened. 

Now only a Time Lord could move the crystal, or someone else who managed to telepathically connect with it, to bond with it. And the last step was to make a key, in case he couldn't pilot it himself. He set new coordinates for Earth into his screwdriver and scanned them into the Tardis controls. If this orphaned time machine could manage another trip, it would travel to the place and time he’d set. And he could give anyone the key telepathically, if he needed them to pilot it. 

“It’s simply astounding--” he said to his companions, stepping back out of the cave and preparing to explain to them what he’d discovered about the new time machine. 

“Doctor!” Amy interrupted again. 

As she spoke, he saw the trail of people that had surrounded the clearing. They looked human--black-haired, fair-skinned humans, dressed in the shredded bark and orange leaves of the trees. 

“Well,” gulped the Doctor. “Never mind this Cave Tardis. Looks like it’s time to meet the natives.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” said Amy. “Let’s hope they’re friendly.”

\---------------

“Visitors from the sky!” called one of the men. “Are you aiming for the Kavorian compound? You’ve fallen in the wrong place!”

“The what?” asked the Doctor, looking around. 

Amy took in the sight of the people. “Doctor,” said Amy. “There are families and old folks here.”

“The whole village come to see us?” asked the Doctor.

“We don’t often have visitors,” the man explained to the Doctor. “I assumed you belonged with the other ones, who saved us from the Black Star.”

He watched Amy and the Doctor shake their heads. “We’re on our own,” said the Doctor. “Oh, and I’m the Doctor, this is Amy.”

“I’m Olain.” The man reached out to shake the Doctor’s hand in his own.

“So. Well. Black star?” The Doctor returned the handshake and looked up toward the sky. “Ah! The Gamma radiation’s being siphoned off by—Kavorians?”

“They have been kind.” Olain nodded. 

“Who are they, exactly?”

Olain just shook his head. “They built a walled village and hide inside it.” He shrugged. “All that energy must be killing them, so they keep to themselves.” 

“And let me guess,“ the Doctor said, folding his arms across his chest, “you don’t know how they’re collecting the radiation or what they’re doing with it?”

“Only protecting us,” the man shrugged, his eyebrows furrowed. “We can still breathe. Our planet is alive, and for that we’re grateful.”

“Are you quite certain?” muttered the Doctor. 

“What’s that?” asked the man. 

“Your people came here from somewhere else,” said the Doctor more loudly. “Where are you from? Why live here?”

“We are a simple people,” Olain shrugged. “The Forest provides for us and we only have legends of our ancestors. The question is, why have you come here?”

The Doctor and Amy exchanged a glance. “We’re travelers,” said Amy. 

“We felt the radiation,” explained the Doctor, “and swung on by to check everything was all right by you.” 

The man nodded, smiling. “So many friendly visitors. Thanks for your concern, but we’re doing quite well.” 

“Doctor,” asked Amy quietly. “Are they human?”

“Quite possibly,” he answered softly to her, so they couldn’t hear.

“You’ve come all this way,” said Olain, “I don’t want your trip to be for nothing. Come have a meal with us, and share your tales from the stars.”

The Doctor smiled. “We’d love to—share your hospitality, and hear about your other visitors.” 

But Amy had noticed darkness settling at the edge of the trees. “Who’s that?” she asked, pointing behind them. 

The Doctor and Olain followed her gaze. At the edge of the treeline stood a range of tall figures emerging from the dark trees, with faces like skulls.

Amy clutched her stomach, suddenly nauseous. “I don’t feel so good,” she gasped. 

The Doctor felt a streak of fear rush through him—the air was full of it--and quashed it. “They’re low-level telepathic,” he said. “Try to fight it.” 

From Olain’s people came a number of shrieks. “It’s them,” people called. 

“Don’t look away. Keep an eye on them,” Olain said, stepping closer to the Doctor. “Ever since our visitors set up their base to protect us from the radiation, these creatures have followed us. But look away, and we forget.”

“What are they?” asked Amy.

“We don’t know. They watch us. They make us feel slightly sick. And then we forget them as soon as we look away.”

The creatures at the edge of the trees started to shuffle toward them. 

“We’ve seen them before, Amy,” the Doctor said to her. “Don’t you remember?”

Amy shook her head. “No.”

“Silence will fall,” the Doctor whispered. Amy’s eyes grew wide, trying to understand why that sounded familiar and so ominous.

“Something’s wrong,” Olein said. “They never infringe on us. They just watch.”

The creatures at the edge of the forest swept toward them, and a hissing sound surrounded them as they approached. 

“So what do we do?” Amy turned to the Doctor.

“We run,” he whispered hoarsely. “We must get these people to safety. We run.”

“The creatures avoid the river,” nodded Olain. “We’ll go there.”

“We’ll follow.”

“Look out for the children!” Olain called over his shoulder, as he started to run. He grabbed a woman’s hand next to him—could be his wife, Amy thought.

Crow turned to a woman that held two children nearby. “If we’re running, let me carry her,” he said. He took the baby from her arms. “I’m Crow,” he introduced himself to her other child, a young boy, and took his hand. To the woman he said, “Let’s go.” 

She grinned at him gratefully and ran beside him, following Olain. 

Amy turned to see who else needed help. The men of the tribe had gathered around the women, taking their hands and leading them to safety. Amy took a child’s hand. 

The Doctor was looking around wildly as if to defend them against the creatures, but another little girl was lagging behind. He grabbed her hand.

“I’m the Doctor. What’s your name?”

“Lorna!” she called.

“Lorna, run! Quick as you can.” They ran through the forest, following the tribe, until he swept her up in his arms and sped up, catching up to the rest of the group further down a ravine. 

At some point, he knew they had run past his Tardis, and he wondered if he could even find it again in this dense forest. All he knew is they had to make it to the river—otherwise, there would be no chance. 

But as they gathered on the shore of the river—a beautiful stream, really, rushing along with a mild current at its center, surrounded by lush trees—the Doctor felt confused.

He looked around wildly. The women were tending the children. Crow and the woman he had helped were whispering to each other. Olain was walking around, talking with all the men. They held knives, but most of them were closing up their blades and tucking them away in their togas and boots.

And Amy was walking up to him, “What’s happened? What are we running from? Are we safe yet?”

The Doctor shook his head. “I can’t remember, Amy.” He rubbed his hands together and looked around.

Everything seemed still, besides the tribe of people. But he noticed thick marks cut in tally lines in the tree trunks—white, fresh wood oozed with sap, and the calm scent of the trees surrounded them. 

Olain turned to him then. “Welcome to our village,” he said. “Let’s get you something to eat,” and led them into a grove of trees that hid a small cave where the tribe was gathering.


	4. Chapter 4

Whoever this Jack character was, he was used to special ops, or maybe he was just another thrill seeker with a death wish. Rory really hoped it was the former. From somewhere on his person, Jack pulled out a multi-tool and started cutting wires on the fence, apparently planning to break into the compound.

Rory didn’t have much time to wonder why, exactly, the Doctor’s companions had a habit of jumping head first into the most dangerous situations that presented themselves, and ignoring orders not to wander off. 

“Come on,” Jack pushed his way through the hole he’d cut, and Rory wasn’t about to stay behind. He slipped through the fence and followed as Jack made a run for the buildings. Between the forest and the concrete structures there was nothing but the flat yard of dust, and their feet kicked up a cloud. Rory felt more like a wild turkeys around hunting grounds, than an intergalactic spy sneaking into an alien base. 

They reached the buildings safely and flattened their backs to the warm concrete. Their lungs heaving as they tried to catch their breath, they watched the dust settle. Rory watched as Jack looked around, squinting. 

“What now?” Rory hissed once he could breathe. Jack nodded upward, and then Rory saw the video cameras mounted on the corners of the walls.

Jack turned his back to Rory and started to move, and Rory followed, pressing close to the concrete to avoid any chance they’d be picked up on the cameras. The wall was bare with no doors or windows, and they were exposed to anyone looking out from the forest. The mid-day light glanced off the trees, shimmering, and everything within the forest stayed dark and hidden—maybe watching them. 

Jack stopped abruptly and Rory pulled back so they didn’t collide. He could smell Jack’s cologne, or his sweat, and found it comforting somehow, so he didn’t pull away. 

“That’s it,” Jack muttered, and he peered around the wall, then leaned back toward Rory. “There’s an open area in there, and several buildings just like this one.”

“So what next?” Rory looked in Jack’s blue eyes and could see the reflection of himself. 

“Guess we’ll have to go in.” With his cocky grin, Jack seemed far too happy about this mission. 

Rory opened his mouth to argue that they could, in fact, do the opposite. They could run in the other direction, to report to the Doctor what they’d seen. 

But before he could utter a syllable, a child’s voice sang out. “Tick tock goes the clock, and River’s got her toys.”

A girl passed between the buildings and out toward the forest with a skipping dance, swinging around a black case that looked too heavy for her. With both hands, she rocked it like a pendulum from her arms. The pale dress she wore didn’t stop her from sitting down on the ground and kicking up a flurry of dust, less than fifty yards away from Jack and Rory. 

Jack put a finger to his lips. But the child either didn’t notice them yet or didn’t care that they were there. She tucked her long blonde hair behind her ears, and began unzipping the black case. From it, she pulled an array of objects—weapons—that looked like a small gun, a knife, chains, and a larger gun. She was still humming and finished her rhyme: “Tick tock, goes the clock, until the Doctor dies.”

Jack’s face lit up in equal measure of disbelief, horror, and awe. “Those are some serious pieces.” Then he turned to Rory. “Stay here!” pushed himself off the wall and strolled out to the girl. He passed in front of her and settled on the other side, so when she glanced up, she was looking out toward the trees and not toward Rory. 

Rory peered around the corner into the gap between the buildings. He couldn’t run back for the trees without the girl noticing him, too. Sure enough, the security camera was trained outward toward the girl, and Jack was probably in its range. If someone in the compound was watching the feed, they’d already seen Jack. 

Rory could either stay put or go inside the compound. Perhaps Jack was the distraction they’d needed. Taking a deep breath to steady himself, Rory moved around the building, inward toward the complex. He saw that the long dirt expanse continued between the buildings, and inside was a courtyard of dust, surrounded by more of the same structures with wide wooden doors. Feeling bold, he walked toward them.

Fifty yards away, Jack didn’t notice Rory’s intention, because his attention was focused on this girl who played with weapons as if they were toys. 

“Hello there,” he greeted her, and she stared up at him with a little surprise and a bit of shyness. “And who are you?” 

She was probably seven or eight, Jack thought—older than his grandson had been. It had been quite a while since he thought of Stephen and for a startled moment, he realized the thought didn’t make his guts cramp up and his heart scream, the way it once had. Time was doing its job, after all—time and traveling far, far away. 

“I’m Jack,” he said. “Whatcha got here? These are dangerous, you know.” He looked down at her weapons. The large gun was disarmed but the smaller one looked loaded, and he reached out to take a closer look. 

“That’s mine!” In a whiff, she’d grabbed the gun and had it pointed at him. 

Jack stepped back. “That’s not a toy,” he said, putting his hands slowly in the air. The safety was still on, but he wasn’t going to gamble that she wouldn’t disarm it and shoot him dead—and as immortal as he might be, he didn’t know what these creatures might do if they discovered his unusual talent. “Please put it down. I’m not going to take your things.”

“Oh, all right,” she grinned mischievously. “Since you said please.” She lowered the weapon.

“Thanks,” Jack said, with a relieved half-chuckle, lowering his arms again. “Now, who are you? Don’t you have dolls and trains? No?”

“What would I do with those?” She looked truly puzzled, and then grinned. She reached down, and Jack took another quick, instinctive step away just before she lunged at him, holding the point of a knife against his chest. 

“Okay,” he said, holding up his hands. She knew how to wield the blade, too—her lunge was perfect, her shoulder well-positioned, and her eyes glittered like steel with the controlled concentration of a martial artist. “Who are you, then?” 

And then she dropped the pose, laughing almost hysterically. “It’s just playing!” 

“Is it?” Jack asked, dropping his hands. 

“’Course! You’re bigger than me.” She said, her voice full of scorn that only a child could have. She looked him over—he could see her taking stock of him. And then her eyes fell on his wristwatch. Her arm holding the knife went limp and she took a cautious step toward him, her movements once more loose and uncoordinated as a child.

Her palm found his wrist, and her small, cold fingers twisted. He obeyed her motion to turn it over. She looked at the watch as if she could tell it was something special. And that’s when Jack’s heart moved to his throat, when he could see some kind of recognition on her face. 

This was no ordinary child who’d learned to play with knives, and he wasn’t going to get anywhere by asking questions. In a moment, both of her small hands were at his wrist, and he wrenched it away as she started to tug at the fasteners. 

“That’s not a toy,” Jack said, a warning in his voice that no one, especially a child, could miss. 

“Come now, Captain Harkness,” a much older voice said nearby—an older woman’s voice, a bit contemptuous and a bit testy. “We know all about you already.” He looked up to see a woman in a black gown and a strange eye patch grinning at him. 

Jack stood up at attention. “What do you know?” 

Tall figures loomed behind the woman then, wrenching his eyes away from her. They were skeletal shadows, backlit by the sun. But whatever they were, they had hold of Rory. Jack felt sick to his stomach. 

“Now, be a good man, and give the girl your wrist-watch,” the woman ordered him. “We can’t have you hopping away, can we?”

 

\---

 

Rory saw dark bars slam in front of his eyes and realized he was in a cell. The air was cold around him, except for body warmth – beside him were the thick shoulders of Jack Harkness. Looking out, he saw black uniforms on the humpbacked forms of lizard-like creatures with ridged foreheads. He saw a glimpse of their long snouts as they locked the cell, glaring back at him, then they turned away. 

Rory looked at Jack who was also glaring out at the lizard beasts. “What?” Rory asked, shaking his head to dispel his confusion, “What just happened?”

Jack retreated to the far wall and leaned against it, as their jailers turned their backs and left them alone in the cell. “Last I remember, I was talking to that girl outside—she was threatening to stab me.” 

“And that was your first clue something was off?” Rory asked. 

“One thing you might as well learn, and fast,” Jack said. “As long as you’re around the Doctor, something’s bound to be off. Even if it’s just the milk in the Tardis fridge.”

“I was trying to sneak into the compound,” Rory said. “I thought with you out in the open to distract them, I could get inside.”

“That was your first mistake,” Jack said. “I waited on the outskirts, and you walked right into them.”

“No—my first mistake was following you in past that fence.”

Jack pushed himself back off the wall and paced around the room. “Well, I guess we’re getting a look inside now—just a little more inside than we wanted.” 

“The Doctor will come find us—right?” Rory asked, squinting around. The cell was black stone, muddy and dark, and he couldn’t imagine a way out, even with Jack’s multitool and smug penchant for resurrection. But the Doctor—now, he might think of something. And if not, there was always Amy. Good old Amy, smart Amy, clever Amy—she would never just leave him here.

“You think so?” Jack looked down, rubbing his wrist where the watch had been. 

Rory plopped himself down on the floor and hit his head back against the wall. “What else can we do?”

“What do we know about this place?” Jack asked. “Concrete bricks, grout, iron bars--a jail cell, in a one-story concrete building on a sparsely populated planet. This must be where they’re capturing that gamma radiation signal and converting it—but into what? They recognized my vortex manipulator. This place must be full of tech—if we could only get a look.”

“We’re on the wrong side of the bars for that,” Rory observed. 

Jack slid down the wall beside him. “You’re right, and in that case, there’s only one thing left to do.”

Still resting his head on the wall, Rory turned his neck to look at Jack. “And what’s that?”

“Naked wrestling.” Jack grinned widely and raised an eyebrow. “Got a stopwatch?”


	5. Chapter 5

The sound of rustling footsteps and boots on concrete woke Rory, and he took a deep breath to rouse himself from his dozing. The air was stale and stuffy, full of Jack’s cologne, their sweat, and the dirt of their cell. 

He was still in prison, then. He hoped the Doctor and Amy were faring better, and hopefully, on their way to rescuing him.

At his shoulder, Jack was tense, waiting and watching the bars that held them. 

Earlier, they’d both called out, to find out if other prisoners were incarcerated nearby, and heard only their own voices echoing off the walls. They were alone here, though there might be prisoners somewhere else in the building. 

The footsteps approaching grew louder. There could be other prisoners being led to the cells. Or maybe Amy was on her way to rescue them? 

The footsteps clacked and shuffled, and halted nearby. Rory rolled his head around to the front of their cage, following Jack’s glare, to see a pair of patent black heels, a black evening gown, and ample cleavage approaching them. Rory pushed himself to his feet. The wall was rough, gritty against his back. He came face to face with the woman. She wore an eye patch and pursed her lips, looking sour in middle age.

She was flanked by bipedal lizards, wearing smart-fitting black jackets and tunics, over layers of orange and yellow scales. Their faces jutted out from small, husky scaled necks, with flaring nostrils and yellow eyes set back on their heads. And they were holding small, high-tech semi-automatic weapons in their long, bony fingers, aimed toward the prisoners.

Lizards with guns weren’t the first ridiculous thing he’d seen, yet Rory still had to stifle an urge to giggle hysterically. He took a deep breath instead, grateful for the solid bulk of the Captain beside him. 

Jack Harkness had lost all traces of humor. With all the spring-loaded, cautious movements of a predator, he stalked up to the iron bars of their cell. “Who are you?” he demanded. 

The woman raised an eyebrow and chuckled. “Oh, Captain,” she answered, her voice crackling. “Renegade Time Agent, and sometime-companion of the Doctor. We knew you’d come. We just didn’t know quite when.”

“We’re here now,” Rory muttered. He turned to Jack. “What’s a Time Agent?” 

“You’re a bit late, don’t you think?” The woman said, still looking at Jack. “And you haven’t told your friend about your past? Well, now.”

“What do you want?” Jack asked her. “If you know all about me, how come we know nothing about you?”

“I am Madame Kovarian—not that my name will be of any use to you.” She approached then, leaning over and presenting her cleavage and a striking stare. “Could it be? We’ve caught you so early in your timeline, you don’t know us yet?”

“No idea,” Jack answered with a shrug.

“So you may as well let us go,” added Rory.

“And give me back my wristwatch,” Jack added. “It’s broken anyway. It’s no good to you.”

“Ah,” Kovarian smiled. “Yes, your vortex hopper? Is that how you arrived, then?”

“How else?” Jack asked. “We got energy signatures from this planet, so we came here to refuel. But it’s drained and useless, just sentimental value to me now.”

“Ah,” smiled Kovarian. “Exactly why we’re here, to absorb all this brilliant energy. But I’m sorry,” she added, sounding pleased with herself rather than apologetic. “All the energy here belongs to us. You’re stuck here now.”

“Yeah, right, we get that,” Rory rolled his eyes.

“Just let us go,” Jack told her. “We’ll be sure to remember your hospitality some day. Whatever’s happened in your timeline, we haven’t done that yet. The future could be changed.” 

“Oh no,” nodded the woman, thoughtfully. “We can’t go creating paradoxes, can we?”

“Best not,” Jack conceded.

“But the future could be changed,” she smiled, pondering them. “After all, the Doctor’s so good at that.” 

Up close, her features looked grotesque, as if she’d tried to cover up all the signs of aging, the wrinkles, the chapped lips and flaring nostrils with too much cream foundation, eye shadow, and dark lipstick. But it could have been the sneer that made her ugly, rather than the powders and pastes. 

“We’ll have the handsome one executed,” she declared, finally. “Mr. Jack Harkness, _former_ companion of the Doctor.”

Rory looked at the ceiling. “Thank God, I’m not handsome,” he said. “Sorry, Jack.”

“This isn’t over,” Jack said in a low growl, as the guards cocked their guns. Their long, ridged brows narrowed, and Jack looked into their yellow eyes and vertical pupils. Their yellow scales glinted with a green tint in the dim light. Then the guns rang out in sonic cracks that echoed off the walls, and Jack was flung backwards. 

Rory watched, stomach in his mouth, as the red gush of blood covered Jack’s blue shirt, and he stumbled to the floor. 

“There’s nothing I can do.” Rory swallowed, slumping down beside him. In an emergency room, he would have tried to staunch the bleeding until a doctor could arrive. Perhaps they could extract the bullet and shattered shards of ribs, and put him on life support in ICU, and in a chance out of a hundred, the patient might live. But there was no help here. 

As he gasped, scrabbling at the dark cement of the cell floor, Jack thought, the Doctor was going to _kill_ him.

Rory took hold of Jack's hands, and in a few moments his wild eyes went glazed and still, his muscles stopped spasming, and his face drained of color. Rory felt a sob in his throat, and he was grateful he’d worked in a hospital and that death was nothing new to him. He wondered how other companions of the Doctor coped. 

He also wondered how long the resurrection would take this time. He looked around, where the Kovarian woman was still watching them. 

“It’s done,” she said. “Take him to the morgue and extract his artron energy.” 

The doors clanged, and the guards dragged Jack’s body out by his feet, smearing blood across the floor and down the corridor. But Rory could have laughed. For all this Kovarian woman knew, she’d missed the most important piece of the puzzle, Jack’s immortality. 

If Rory had one hope left, deep in this prison, it rested in the strangely handsome and mysterious corpse of one Captain Jack Harkness. 

\---

Crow Johnson was running through the jungle. As one foot left the ground, he seemed to hover in the air like he was suspended in the pocket of a moment. Then his other foot landed, only to push off again. He wasn’t anchored properly to earth. The trees of the jungle pulsed around him like they were illuminated by a strobe. Through the shifting light, he followed the Doctor, Amy Pond, and the villagers. 

Finally, hours or minutes later, they stopped running under the dappled shade of fruit trees and palms. Crow turned in a dizzy circle to look around. He was shaky and light-headed from too many days hiking in the jungle without enough food or water. 

He wobbled on his feet, then stuck out an arm and leaned heavily on a tree nearby. “How long were we running?” he asked no one in particular. 

Amy Pond, flushed and panting from running, shrugged with a dramatic wave of her arms. “Who knows?” She plopped herself down on a large boulder.

Crow squinted at the tree he was leaning on, noticing the orange leaves that fluttered in a breeze, and thick purple fruit that hung from the trunk, heavy in the humid air of the jungle. He’d never seen any tree quite like it. At his feet, red spiders and insects crawled around the tree’s exposed fleshy roots. Crow was used to exotic tropical insects and plants, but these weren’t quite right, weren’t quite real.

The Doctor had said they were on a different planet, but Crow couldn’t believe it. If it was true, nothing would be this recognizable. No. Dizzy with exhaustion and hunger, he must have collapsed and was walking through some fever dream. He’d fallen through the looking glass into a space between worlds, and now here he was, communing with the spirits.

Except, some of these spirits talked with an English accent. Crow sat down next to Amy Pond on the smooth, flat boulder. It was spongy and blue, pocked like coral, and he wondered if more bright insects might peek their heads out any moment. “So, you’re English?” he said.

“Scottish, actually,” Amy smiled back. 

“Right, home of bagpipes and Morris dancing,” Crow scratched his head. It didn’t seem like something he’d dream up.

Many tribes of Mexico and South America believed in a parallel dimension, where spirits and gods lived. Only shamans could travel there safely. Some boys, approaching manhood, tried to make the journey and meet their spirit guides. Sometimes the animals or spirits helped and protected them, but there were always tricks. You could get trapped here. You couldn’t trust anything to be what it seemed. 

The villagers stood nearby with brown faces and dark eyes. Women with their children, and crowds of young kids stood and watched the newcomers, without speaking. As if they were waiting, or curious to see what they would do, they crowded around. While Amy nervously toyed with the hem of her skirt, Crow felt a bit like he was on the wrong side of an enclosure at a zoo.

Amy tucked her henna-red hair behind her ears, and looked out toward the river winding between the trees. The water there eddied in spirals in the shallows, where tall ferns and plants grew like a lush, cartoon jungle. Broad, orange leaves that fell were decomposing in veiny sepia skeletons along the shore. 

Women and children gathered there too, washing laundry and playing. Some women carried babies wrapped on their backs with long bundles of fabric. And some children carried younger siblings. A small girl stooped down to gather water and drink from her hands, and the baby on her back didn’t even shift or fuss as water splashed his legs. He just looked around with wide eyes, observing the other children. And downstream, a man with a peppered beard had removed his shirt, using it to sponge water over his back. The river was the heart and life of the village, Crow thought, just like on Earth.

A young man came up to them then, carrying a machete-like blade over one shoulder and a long branch bearing fruit over the other. “Bananas?” he asked. Then as he hoisted the stalk to the ground, he added. “I’m Jye.” The boy’s face was framed by oily locks of black hair, and his teeth shone white against his olive-brown skin as he smiled and set to work cutting the white, speckled fruit from the stalk. 

He handed one to each of them and showed them out to peel it. Inside, they found it juicy and green like a kiwi. 

Amy took a bite and juice that dribbled down her chin. “Glorious!” 

Crow also found it delicious, but only allowed himself a few mouthfuls. He should know better than to eat fruit on a strange world. Myths and legends were full of warnings. Eating food in the otherworld often changed you into another creature, or made you a prisoner. In Greek myth, Persephone, having eaten the seeds of the pomegranate in the Underworld, had to return there each winter as the prisoner and wife of Hades. 

There were practical considerations, too, like how sick you could get from drinking foreign water. His first time to Mexico, as a kid, his mother had ended up in the hospital, feverish and vomiting. They were American, and they’d had all their shots from childhood—the regimen of TDAP, polio, hepatitis, and so on. And when you traveled there were more, like yellow fever, typhoid, meningitis. But you couldn’t get inoculations for everything. 

Cholera. Giardia. Parasites. And if this was a strange alien planet there were bound to be Martian diseases. Amy seemed unconcerned though, setting her peel aside and reaching for a second fruit that she gulped down in untidy bites. 

A sharp, repeated sound echoed through the humid air, and Crow looked around to see two men wielding machetes, and hacking long, straight cuts into two stout tree trunks. Their blades sent strips of tree bark flying into the ferns, and the white interior heart of the tree was opened. It wept a thick sap that would coat the tree bark and scar over. 

On either side, the trees already were scarred up and down with straight lines like tally marks. Nearby, the Doctor stood, watching them. He was surrounded by a crowd of children, also watching and talking amongst themselves. 

“They are counting,” Jye explained. “Our healers, they are shamans that count the spirits between the worlds.” 

Crow frowned. “You don’t mean us?”

But Jye shook his head. “No, you are solid. We can’t see the spirits, only the shamans do. Usually we feel sick afterward.” 

Amy looked at Crow. “We were feeling sick, weren’t we?” 

Crow nodded. “Bit green about the gills. You’re looking better now. Much—redder.” He smiled at her strange, bright hair. 

When the robed healers had finished, they turned back toward the villagers, raising their arms to wave, and Crow could see they wore matching eye patches. “They’re half blind?”

“Yes,” Jye nodded. “They replaced mortal sight, for a divine vision. Insight.”

“That’s not entirely a blessing,” Crow guessed.

“No,” Jye agreed. 

The Doctor had turned away, and joined them. “Quite brilliant, actually,” he smiled at Jye and Olain. “Keeping track of those creatures, even when you’ve forgotten them. But how can you defend yourselves, if you can’t see them?”

“They move like ghosts,” Jye shrugged. “We’re scared. We run, but they don’t attack.”

Olain nodded. “They only showed up when our other visitors arrived.” 

“Your visitors,” the Doctor said, biting viciously into a banana and considering this. “You said the Kovarians. Who are they? Where did they come from?”

“We don’t know,” Jye shook his head, averting his eyes. “We are not travelers like you.”

“Well,” the Doctor smiled at the fruit, “You could make a fortune selling these bananas off-world. They’re incredible. Love a banana.” 

“So the food here is safe?” Crow asked him. 

“What?” the Doctor said, then nodded. “Oh yes! Safe? Of course!” Then he drew a metal wand from his jacket pocket and waved it with bony fingers toward Crow and the fruit he held. “Now, you’re brilliant. You might call this, what, a kiwi-nana? A ban-iwi?”

Beside him, Amy Pond groaned, but the Doctor was studying his little machine and didn’t respond. 

Crow waved an arm at the lush world around them. “Doesn’t matter if you’ve traveled much, if you’ve got all you need here.” 

“True, truly true,” the Doctor agreed, his face twisting as if he had a deep thought, or seriously needed to find a restroom. He tucked his wand away. “But don’t you wonder what those creatures look like? Or, what secrets your new neighbors are keeping?”

Olain laughed. “Doctor, you have enough curiosity for all of us combined. But you’ve traveled the stars. What’s your advice?”

The Doctor steepled his fingers. “I need to speak with your shamans, and learn what they see.” 

“Yes,” Olain nodded. “But first, a tour. And dinner. You’re hungry. You must eat with us.” 

Jye nodded and stood, leading them downstream. Tucked among the trees were small huts of mud and logs, barely large enough for a bed and chair, but not unusual for what Crow was used to seeing in Mexico. In a small clearing among the houses, steam and smoke were rising from cauldrons that bubbled over small cook fires. 

Crow’s mouth watered as the scent of a rich meat stew reached him, and he clutched at Jye’s arm, tighter, suddenly feeling woozy. Jye guided him to sit on a fallen tree trunk nearby, and a plate was put in his lap. There were skewers of meat, along with slices of some starchy root like a thick white yam. 

Amy looked at her food. “What do you reckon that is?”

Crow winked, brandishing his skewer. “Some large rodent, like a squirrel or rat?” He took a bite of the meat, enjoying the chewy tendons and the juice sliding back in his throat. It was hot and good. 

“Don’t start,” Amy grimaced.

“They’re common in villages like this. I’m sure you’ve heard of the guinea pig? They’ve been eaten in Peru for centuries.” 

“But they’re pets,” Amy frowned at her food.

Crow laughed and shrugged. “You’d pay a higher price for a river rat in Louisiana the size of a beaver, it’s called a Nutria. Or a cane rat in West Africa, called a grasscutter. They could cost you over fifty bucks. Supposedly a delicacy.” 

“So’s escargot, but it’s still snails,” Amy muttered. “And fondue, it’s just cheese and little skewers.”

Crow shook his head. “Are you hungry or not?” The yam was tasteless, but starchy and filling. And the meat wasn’t much, but it was like relief on his tongue, proteins and lipids blended together with salt and spices. And then a mug of steaming, weak tea was put in his hand, and Jye squeezed Crow’s shoulder and sat down nearby with a plate of his own. 

Crow took long, deep draughts from the weak herb tea, and felt that even if he hadn’t found the destination he’d set out for, at least he felt at home.

When he looked up, Amy was chewing thoughtfully. “Not too bad. But I’m not eating guinea pigs any time soon.” 

\---

“Sir.” Nurse Shan Je greeted his surgeon as he pulled on the long gauntlet gloves used in the morgue. He had scrubbed and wore his uniform, the green robes with the amber emblem of the Academy. 

The surgeon Hel ke Fe had started without him, eager to collect information while the corpse was still fresh. He greeted Shan Je, but didn’t look up. “Apprentice.”

On the table, their patient lay with his mouth and eyes open, with an expression of shock not uncommon in a sudden, violent death. The tongue sat purple and swollen between his grey lips. Clouded eyes stared at the ceiling as if they could bore through it and gather the energy from the planet’s sun. If Shan Je were versed in old human traditions, he might say the soul was looking for heaven. 

But the nurse was more interested in the work in front of him. Small electrodes trailed from the body, hooking to machines that scanned and gathered data. The geometry of the corpse’s face matched a pureblood human, and the musculature of his body was visible, leaving little room for doubt. Yet something told Shan Je that assumption was wrong, wrong, wrong. “Sir,” he dared, “I don't think he's human.”

The surgeon hovered over the body, sifting through its shattered ribs with a scalpel. At the nurse’s comment, the scalpel paused but the surgeon did not look up. “What makes you say that?” 

Shan Je hesitated, unable to put a finger on it. “Just a feeling.”

Fe turned to look at him. His face, part frog-like, part human, took on a pursed look as if he might flick out a tongue and end the commentary from his nurse-apprentice once and for all. His bug eyes bugged larger, the blue veins showing through the yellow surface, and his cheeks puffed out in disapproval. “A feeling, nurse?”

Shan Je nodded, looking suitably embarrassed. Intuitive feelings were common in humans, but not well respected among other species. He’d better learn to squelch them better, he thought, if he hoped to one day inherit his own Surgery practice.

Fe’s face twitched, but then he shrugged. “It's easy enough to run a genetic scan. Go ahead.”

“Thank you, Surgeon.” With due deference, Shan Je nodded. Then he shifted Jack’s foot into position and lifted a small laser cutter from a tray of tools nearby. Carefully aiming the tip of the instrument at the junction between the middle toe and the foot, he pressed a button and watched the sharp laser glow slice through the epidermis and fat layers, through muscle and cartilage. He held tight to the toe as it came loose in his hand, and then settled the laser instrument back on its tray. 

The Surgeon watched his work. “Well done, but there are less grotesque methods.”

“Yet this is simplest. No need to reposition the body.” Shan Je brandished the toe then, turning it over in his hands to examine it. The wound was thoroughly cauterized by the laser extraction process, yet the flesh still looked pink and alive. “This man. What's he made of?” It was a rhetorical question.

“He's fresh,” shrugged the Surgeon. “Toe's still getting blood and therefore oxygen, allowing for good coloration. Good DNA material.” He waggled his head approvingly.

The nurse stuck the specimen in a dish on the lab table, attaching the scanner-lid apparatus. He plugged the scanner into the computer, and loaded up the genetic scan software. He opened a new file and clicked Scan, and the petri dish with the toe lit up with streaming bands of light, ultraviolet, white light, and infrared. The status bar marked the software’s progress on screen and in another minute, a 3D image of DNA formed, flashing in reds and blues to identify the proteins.

“It's like he's human, plus...” Shan Je trailed off as he typed, calling up other windows to get more information on the chromosomes.

“Plus what?” the surgeon frowned at the hole in Jack's chest, and turned to look at the screen when his apprentice did not answer. What he saw on screen sent a thrill through him. “Fascinating! If we scanned him, he'd show traces of artron energy, time travel particles swirling around him like shining insects.”

“We’d expect the artron energy. This is something else,” Shan Je’s expressive eyebrows wrinkled now in thought. The nurse, fully human, was very proud of his eyebrows and combed them each morning. His hands flew to them now, stroking them as he considered the data. 

“You’re right.” Hel ke Fe pushed him aside to get a closer look. His bulky frame and bulging joints easily displaced Shan Je away from the medical controls. He typed wildly, fingers sticking and releasing from the keys with a loud sucking sound, drilling down deeper into the data. Running quick simulations, he tracked the genetic decay in Jack’s body backwards in time. Long lines of genetic code filled the screen. The surgeon croaked with excitement when he found what he was looking for. “He used to be human, only now he's changed. He's part Time Lord!”

Shan Je frowned. “Aside from River, I thought the only Time Lord left on this side of the Time Lock was the Doctor.” 

“So did we,” said the surgeon. “But enough exposure to the Time Vortex, plus travel in the Doctor's TARDIS?” His leathered skin wiggled in a shrug beneath the surgery robes. “It must have changed him. Think what this means for time travelers. We could breed Time Lords!”

“Some legends say the child River Song had two human parents, and only exposure to the Time Vortex in utero changed her DNA.” On another computer nearby, Shan Je searched through the databases, looking for River's DNA to compare to their new specimen. 

“They also say the Doctor is shameless.” The surgeon had turned away from the machines now, and was hovering over their patient again, plucking out the electrodes from Jack's forehead, his stomach and thighs. He clicked his tongue. “It's too bad, really. We could have learned so much from this one, alive. But that Kovarian is quick to shoot and slow to ask the right questions.”

“There are questions that must never be asked,” answered Shan Je, solemnly, as he’d learned in his days at the Academy. 

“And there are questions that should always be asked,” frowned the surgeon. He respected the religious order of the Silence and their teachings, indeed he would not be working in his position otherwise, but there was a time and a place for spirituality, and a time and place for rigorous investigation as well. “This is a morgue, Apprentice, not a temple.” 

“Yes, sir.”

Some at the Academy would argue that a morgue is a temple of death, thought Shan Je. But this wasn’t a time for philosophy. The surgeon had already turned back to the scan, pulling up more information on Jack's genome, and his nurse stepped aside to watch him work. 

“His aging is retarded,” noted Fe, still studying his screen. “A step off from Time Lord. He's built like a human: one heart, no regeneration. He would have aged very slowly. Must have had remarkable healing capabilities.” 

“Noted.” Shan Je recorded these notes into a file as Fe spoke. 

Behind them, their corpse was warming up, stitching itself back together as the surgeon and nurse began comparing his DNA samples with others they'd collected, from Amelia Williams, the Doctor, and River Song. 

When the surgeon and his apprentice turned back around, their corpse was gone. Muddy footprints, missing one toe, were leading down the corridor.


	6. Chapter 6

Shivering, Jack limped along as fast as he could, trying to gain some distance from the doctors behind him. The corridor around him seemed to be breathing, as if he were inside a giant snake. These walls were grey though, not flesh, and smooth as metal. His foot throbbed against the cool tile, and his head thrummed with a resurrection headache.

He wasn’t sure how much time had passed while he lay dead or if Rory was still safe. At least no one seemed to be following him yet. But he’d woken up to voices talking above him, alien voices translated by the Tardis matrix. They nagged in the back of his mind as he tried to make sense of the words. Among other things, he’d heard: _He’s part Time Lord._

They meant someone besides the Doctor himself or River Song. And it couldn’t be Jack himself, although he was immune to death, because he didn’t have the same sense and control of time the Doctor and River shared. Long as he may live, Jack himself was just a former con man, sometimes a hero, but mostly a drifter. So they must have another Time Lord here, captive, behind these closed doors. 

The thought was thrilling, and Jack began opening doors. He needed weapons, and clothing, and answers. What were these strange signals the Doctor had followed, and were they linked to the new Time Lord? Who were Madame Kovarian and her lizard men, and how did they know about Jack and Rory? 

Finally, one of the doors opened to something useful besides empty labs. In one storage room, among tall shelves stuffed with sheets and medical supplies, Jack found a soft pile of folded black fabric. It was the same tunics worn by the lizard guards. Much as he liked wandering around nude, it was better to fit in with the local fashion.

As he lifted his arms to pull the garment over his head, the skin of his chest grew taut and the scars began to tear. With a burning, sickening rip, they opened. Jack held back a whimper and gritted his teeth. He breathed into the sensation and kept his body still, until the pain calmed and the slice in his sternum stitched itself together again. 

When he was whole again and sure his skin was secure, Jack finished dressing and then checked his body further for damage. He ran his fingers along his burning foot and found the gap where his middle left toe should be. It was growing back, he knew. The missing pieces always did. Yet he never forgot what it was like to lose them. 

At least he was intact, more or less, in all the places that mattered, so he tried to tune out the discomfort. He searched the room, thoroughly, for other useful goodies. He used his teeth to rip off a strip of thick adhesive tape, and bound his foot with it, leaving enough room to allow the missing digit to grow back naturally. He also discovered a spanner and screwdriver—not the sonic type, but it would do as a weapon in a pinch. 

With the tools tucked in the two tunic pockets, Jack hesitated near the door. All was quiet outside. He stepped out, cautiously. 

Then his balance escaped him, and his gut churned with nausea, and Jack could see his own red palm clutching the wall and the light glinting off all the epithelial patterns spiraling across the back of his hand. His stomach threatened to upend itself, and when he gained his footing again, it seemed the doors had shifted around him. His face felt clammy, his throat and chest felt warm and feverish, and in his right hand he clutched the screwdriver so tightly that his skin had gone white. The spanner, in his pocket a moment before, was missing now, and the pocket was empty. 

Turning in a circle, he recognized nothing. He was in a different place, a new long stretch of corridor lined in wood. Jack tucked the screwdriver away again and ran his hands along the wall as he continued to walk, suddenly desperate for a sign of real sunlight from the outdoors. Up was down, and down was sideways in this place, and even his hands were tingling. His stomach jangled like coins, and he felt a physical tug at his nerves that made his muscles twitch and his heart rate increase. 

Some Captain he was, unable to navigate a simple corridor. 

\---

Jye prodded the logs into place, inside a hearth of smooth stones, and the fire began to crackle. Smoke rose, rich with the incense from the wood, and spiraled up into a viscous cloud. They were inside the cave, and the smoke had nowhere to go, but stuck in Amy’s throat like a rock. She began to cough, her throat dry and burning, until she thought she might suffocate. 

Crow settled a large hand on her back. “All right there?” His tanned face was lit even more orange in the firelight, and he peered at her with his eyebrows knit together in concern.

Amy tried to nod, but mostly flailed instead. Finally, her coughing subsided. “Thanks,” she croaked, but the effort was painful. She turned to her other side, where the Doctor sat looking pleased with himself. “Doctor, isn’t it dangerous to have a fire inside a cave?”

The raggedy man raised his eyebrows. “It’s the local custom, Amy. Learn to adapt.” 

She covered her mouth and breathed through her nose the best she could. The fire settled into a fat low flame, and the worst of the smoke dissipated, drifting out the mouth of the cave, and eventually the tickle in her throat relaxed. 

Still, Amy fidgeted. Every planet smelled different. And on some the air was humid and thick and hard to breathe. And on too many of them, the locals took their time with their bloody long ceremonies. 

Jye sat down across the fire on another blanket, and the two robed figures stepped out of the darkness behind him, from deeper within the cave. Their heads were covered with bright head scarves in shades of yellow, and they walked slowly, hands clasped, then sat down beside Jye. Cross-legged on the mat, they finally dropped their hoods. Amy could see their long hair was streaked in grey, and the shadows flickered over their soft features. Although they were tall, they were women, not men. 

Their clear eyes glittered with the light as they looked around the circle, but the shadows gathered around their matching eye patches. Now, Amy supposed, they were ready to begin.

“Whom do we greet?” asked the taller woman. Her voice was firm and clear, not friendly, but not impatient. 

Following the local custom, Olain introduced the Doctor and his companions, serving as their linguist or translator. And Jye responded, introducing the shamans: their names were Kerrick and Shanti, and they’d been healers of the tribe for a long time. 

When the Doctor asked them about the visitors, Kerrick answered him directly. “Our visitors keep to themselves,” she explained. “But we’ve seen them, great lizard creatures with burning yellow eyes, who’ve told us these stories. They say our sun has been fighting with another star nearby. The other star was defeated, and it bled fire and died and went black. Now its ghost haunts the sky, seeking revenge. Like an evil spirit, it can make our world sick and diseased with its dark light.” 

The Doctor nodded. “The star died in a hypernova burst of gamma radiation. It should destroy the planet.”

“We thought the same thing,” Shanti, the other healer, explained. “But our visitors say they’ll keep us safe.”

“How?” the Doctor challenged her. “How can they possibly do that?”

Shanti shrugged, spreading her arms wide, “They built a village, sequestered in the north desert, where they’re siphoning all this dark energy. Like a magnet, drawing all the radiation. We don’t know how but it must be killing them.”

Then Kerrick held up a hand. “You will say they’re only an alien race, with science beyond our knowledge, but they’ve made miracles. We’ve seen many things since our new friends arrived. And in our legends and history, when the gods come down from heaven, and sacrifice themselves, we know that one era ends and something new begins.” 

The Doctor smiled, “Yes, I see.” He twirled his hands in his lap and looked down at them. “A crippled, dying star seeking revenge. And your gods, swooping in to rescue you. I do love the poetry of it. But what about you, your people? Where did you come from?”

“In the beginning, our ancestors came from another planet,” Shanti said. “They followed a ship known as the Eagle across the sky. It was piloted by a god, who guided us here and crashed. The ship disintegrated on impact, but our people landed safely. That’s how our current era began, and for many generations we’ve lived among the rocks and trees, living off the river.”

“And now,” Kerrick said, “we see the future. All that power from the star is raining onto our planet, soaking into our neighbor’s buildings. But instead of melting and burning the stones, it’s absorbed.” 

“Yes but what are they doing with it?” the Doctor said. “All that radiation must be going somewhere. Doesn’t matter if they’re gods or men. But never mind that. There’s another thing that’s bothering me.”

“Yes, it must be,” nodded Kerrick. “The fear that’s itching at the back of your mind since you arrived here in the forest.”

The Doctor turned sharply to look at her, and stalked around the fire to stand face to face beside the shaman. “How do you know?” 

Matching the Doctor’s intensity, she rose from her seat to look him in the eye. Amy felt a dread in the back of her throat. “Because,” Kerrick continued, “You remember how you landed, but you can’t remember how you got here, to the river. And something that can make you forget, that’s more than just a high-energy beam in the air.”

The Doctor swallowed and turned a glance to Amy. She nodded: the woman with the eye patch was right. They had gaps in their memory. Amy’s stomach felt upset again, and it wasn’t just the strange meat she’d had for supper. 

“You’ve been counting the spirits on the trees,” the Doctor said slowly. “What are those markings for? What else did you see?” 

Shanti nodded. “Now you’re beginning to listen. They’re tall creatures, with faces like skeletons, formed from something that’s not quite flesh. They call themselves the Silence, and they make you feel sick and scared, and you run, and you don’t know why. But they don’t hurt anyone, Doctor, they only watch. We’ve only started seeing them now, ever since the Kovarians gave us their gifts.”

“What gifts?” the Doctor frowned.

“The sight.” She lifted a hand to her face, and paused, and then slowly lifted the eye patch to reveal a dark shadow where her eye should have been. The cavity was empty, with no glass eye, and no remaining flesh, its details hidden in the smoky darkness of the cave. 

“They did this to you,” the Doctor said, his voice dangerous and low, “And you thank them?” He looked around, but the others had dropped their eyes to the floor, unwilling to look in her face.

Calmly, Kerrick covered her eye again, and looked up at the Doctor. “For many years we doubted our place in the universe. This looks like an injury, but we see so much more now. We’re small and simple as a people, but the Gamma Forest gives us what we need. Outside of our world, the universe is out of balance, too. Each race is meant to have its own place and time. But now they travel in space and time, and different peoples mix, and turn to chaos, to war and death. So, too, the visitors come here, and our world might be ending.” 

“I’ve heard enough.” Furiously, the Doctor looked around. “We’re going.”

“Hold on,” Crow said, “This sounds familiar.”

“Doctor, Time Lord," Kerrick continued. "Your people, too, meddled with time, and for their sin they’re locked away now. Isn’t that true?” She paused. “And now, we’ve seen winged creatures. Stone men who’ve crossed through time to disrupt it.” 

The Doctor looked disturbed now, his hair curling into his face, his hands working together nervously. “You’ve known Time Lords? And the Weeping Angels, you’ve seen them?”

Shanti smiled and pointed at her missing eye. “Oh yes. Chained and harnessed. Captives to our visitors.”

“Weeping Angels aren’t anyone’s captives.” The Doctor shook himself and turned on Crow. “You. What sounds familiar?”

Crow shook his head. “It’s straight out of Aztec legend. Their stories say the Eagle led them to their lands. They believed that gods each had their own time to rule over, to keep the balance between light and dark. And when the gods fought, their struggle held the world in balance, but they would sacrifice themselves to end an age.” 

“Hold on. You’re saying these people are telling stories from Earth mythology?” Amy asked.

Crow shook his head and gestured around them, “This madness! That we’re on another planet! In another time! It sounds like exactly the chaos they talked of. A great disaster would come, like the sun sacrificing itself, or an earthquake, and they would draw a new calendar for the next era.”

“You know our legends?” Olain asked, curious, placing a hand on Crow’s shoulder. “So tell us, what did they say would come, next time?”

Crow shrugged. “It’s from another place and time. They called the next era Ollin 4.”

“Olain Four?” Chaos and chatter broke out in the room as everyone seemed to talk at once. 

Then Jye held up a hand for silence, and turned to the Doctor. “This is the truth. Next week marks Olain’s fourth decade. And tonight, we planned the celebration of Olain Four.” 

“Well, congratulations!” the Doctor said, brightly, grasping Olain’s hand in a mighty handshake as the poor man just looked bewildered. “Happy birthday’s in order! Why didn’t you tell us sooner? We could have brought some cake.”

\---- 

“Dagnabbit!” Rory swore loudly, alone in his cell, just to hear his own voice. “Curses!” 

If he was going to sit around waiting to be rescued, at least he could get creative with his profanities.

The sleepiness he’d felt earlier was gone. With the scent of the iron of Jack’s blood in the air, and the puddle on the floor slowly drying, Rory’s nerves were rattled. He wasn’t sure if their captors would kill him next or leave him to starve. Either way, Rory Williams, the boy who waited, was not willing to sit by and wait patiently this time. 

Unfortunately, he didn’t seem to have much choice. The cursing wasn’t doing the trick, so next, Rory lashed out and kicked at the bars. He expected a loud clang, hopefully one that sounded like a deep bell and reverberated for a long minute to block the silence around him. The bars did ring out, but the sound was shrill and jingling, followed by a low scraping noise as the door slid open a notch. He winced at the sound, watching the door as it scraped to a standstill again, held in place at the top by a thick black chain. 

But he’d dislodged it a bit from the track, and there was still a gap left at the bottom. He eased a shoe through it, and his leg, his breath coming fast as he suddenly found a smidgen of hope there. Mels and Amy used to make fun of how skinny he was, but his bony frame might just save him now. Awkwardly, Rory angled his hips sideways through the opening. 

But the cold metal pressed around his pelvis and hip flexors, awkward and cutting into the fabric of his jeans. If he got stuck between the bars, that would be torture in itself. Not to mention the embarrassment of being found that way.

So Rory eased himself back into the cell. He held his breath. Listened for any sounds nearby. Nothing. All was quiet. 

It was either wait here or find a way to make this escape plan work. So Rory sighed, then did the one thing he could to make himself smaller. He slipped loose the button and fly of his jeans, and then dropped them in a heap on a dry, blood-free spot of the floor. 

There. He was more naked, but hopefully just skinnier enough to slide through. Before he could get cold, or too embarrassed to follow through, Rory turned his attention back to that promising gap in his cell. First, he slipped his foot and knee through, and then an arm, then hips. Sucking in his stomach and chest and turning his face to the side, he pushed through, but the back of his head knocked against the chain. He had to duck awkwardly, pushing his hips down and out first, bending his knees in a way that nearly tore his ligaments. The iron caught against his temples, and gripped his hair and scraped his scalp. He was even more grateful, now, that Amy hadn’t convinced him to get that ear piercing on Glax—surely it would have ripped out. 

Rory gritted his teeth, pushing through despite the pain of it. Then miraculously, the melon of his head scraped through. He was free then, at least free from the bars. He scratched at his itchy head, and felt no lasting damage. 

His own blonde hairs were sticking out of the chains now, having been ripped out. He pulled them free. No sense leaving genetic samples for these lizards to find. Then, he reached in to grab his jeans. The free hair samples were stuffed in the pockets, and quickly Rory slipped them on again and turned around. 

He took stock of his surroundings--he was in a single room, a small cell, with the only outlet being the stairs that he’d seen the lizards use to drag out Jack’s corpse. He’d expected to see more cells, but this was the only one. The floor was still smeared with Jack’s drying blood, and Rory groaned and stepped around the marks, up and out the door. Thankfully, it wasn’t locked.

With no idea where he was, how to get out, or how to find the Captain, Rory started walking down the long, empty corridor. No sign of sunlight gleamed in beneath the doors, and there were no windows, so he guessed they were underground. 

He couldn’t remember the way in or out. That missing gap in his memory troubled him more than the fact he was trapped in an alien compound. So he was lost. There might be more lizards with guns around any corner. Rory just wanted to find the Captain and get out of there. 

Then again, Jack wasn’t the kind that needed rescuing. And the Doctor would be better suited to that job anyway. Rory decided he’d take the first exit he could find, and let the Doctor or Jack look after the rescuing. Besides, last he’d seen of Jack Harkness, there hadn’t been much left to rescue. 

Rory found his way stumbling around stacks of boxes, palettes, and containers lining the corridors. Here and there were carts of supplies, nearly blocking the path. This area must be unused space, or overflow storage for the rest of the building. It confirmed his worry that he was somewhere underground. 

Around another turn, the corridor opened into a large hall, with more objects stored and piled all around, as if they’d been carted and dumped there with no attention to order. Some objects were tall, covered in large canvas drop cloths, probably to keep out the dust. A wide bolt of fabric had been draped halfway along a tall rectangular frame, and Rory moved around to get a closer look. Underneath was a large cubed box, painted with figures. Some he recognized, all aliens, all strangely shaped and colored. Among others he didn’t recognize, there were enemies of the Doctor, daleks and cybermen, and others he couldn’t name.

Curious, he pulled the coverings off other objects and found many painted with other figures. Some of them looked human, though dressed in funny tribal outfits. One large painting showed a broad-chested man standing on a mountain, his head decorated with plumed feathers, clutched an unconscious woman in his arms. His eyes were black, staring out at Rory as if defiant and sad. He was nearly naked, like some superhero warrior.

Rory turned around, unnerved further by the figures who seemed to watch him, and kept walking down the corridor, which twisted and turned but otherwise remained unchanged. He started checking random doors, hoping to find an exit or stairwell. One opened to a medical room, all dim and quiet, with beds and sheets carefully arranged and medical equipment standing by. 

Another room was clearly armament storage: A large table in the center, with implements for polishing and filing metal, and there were weapons there, but they were all sealed behind glass cases. Rory tried flinging tools at the glass, hoping to score something for self-defense, but it was some impermeable substance and didn’t budge. It barely even made a noise, though it set his teeth on edge as if there was some unheard wavelength buzzing in the air. Startled, unnerved, Rory looked around, thinking he must have set off some kind of hidden alarm system.

Quickly, he retreated back into the corridor. Any moment now, the lizards and the strange woman would descend on him, dragging him back to the dungeons below. Any moment they’d come in laughing at his vain attempt at freedom. 

He kept trying doors, more anxiously than before. But further down the corridor, he found something much worse in a small enclave. There, stock still, was a figure. Another enemy of the Doctor. But this one wasn’t painted. She was stone. Stone fingernails one stone hands, covering a stone face framed by stone hair. And Rory recognized her.

Swallowing his fear, Rory stared at the figure, then carefully backed away around the corner. Don’t blink, he remembered. Blink and you’re dead. 

So, he stood there, carefully not blinking. Could weeping angels get through doors, or creep around corners? Could they tell if he was watching or not? He retreated further down the corridor, then backed himself up against the wall. He shut his eyes.

And when opened them, a split second later there she was, in front of him: A stone figure, with stone hair. A stone dress over stone sandals. Stone claws and sharp, stone teeth, out of place in the hallway.

“Don’t blink, don’t blink,” he whispered, panicking wondering how he could buy enough time to escape. 

Carefully, he managed to close one eye at a time. Always keep one open, always one eye on the angel. As a nurse, he knew the eyes needed moisture. The saline in tears washed away dust and kept the eye lubricated. There was only so long a man could go without blinking. It was involuntary, instinct, to blink and protect the eyes. But as long as he only closed one eye at a time, he’d be all right. Wouldn’t he? 

Winking one eye at the angel, then the other, he backed down the hallway, holding his arms behind him in case he ran into a wall or door. But it barely worked. His eyes burned and itched, drying out. In front of him, the angel stood stock still in the center of the corridor, waiting for her chance. Until just once, Rory blinked, and then there she was right in front of his face, claws extended, her teeth jutting from a horrible jagged cavern of a mouth.

It was time to get out the proper curse words. “Fuck!” Rory said. He started to shuffle backwards as fast as he could. Eventually he’d end up back in that corridor. 

And then a flash of inspiration hit him. He kept backing up. One eye closing at a time. One foot at a time behind him. Blurry, burning vision and all, until finally the hallway opened up in the corner of his eye. And there were the paintings draped in canvas. 

Rory backed up to stand in front of the painting of the tall man, bearing the woman in his arms. The one with the fierce, determined eyes. Rory took one deep breath in, and his lungs inflated, and then he breathed out again. And he shut his eyes, just for a moment.

There she was again, in front of him. Arms extended, frozen, and standing at the mouth of the hallway.

Carefully keeping her in view, Rory shuffled around the painting and began pulling the canvas off every figure he could find. The statue of a Judoon officer. The bust of a Slitheen. A metal etching of a Dalek. All these creatures and more stared out at the hallway, daring the Angel to come nearer. Rory retreated behind the Dalek and once more dared to shut his eyes.

\---

Jack itched at the joints between his fingers and the knuckles of his hands. The electric charge in the air was tingling in his nerves, making him wish he could peel away his skin and scratch at his nerve endings. He kept stalking down the corridor, moving forward toward the sensation. Like a physical tug, it drew him forward. 

He ran his fingertips along the walls to anchor himself, and felt ridges and grooves along its surface. He looked closer. In this portion of the corridor, animals and figures were etched and painted in red and gold on the walls. They were wearing feathers or carrying spears. Some had big paws or sharp claws. They were beasts, or chieftains, or warriors. Or possibly gods.

When he looked back, he realized the stretch of corridor around him was all etched in these bizarre tribal figures. He’d seen them somewhere before, he thought, but couldn’t place where. Unlike most paintings or icons, they weren’t telling a story or depicting a scene. They stood at attention in four neat rows, like soldiers, all marching forward toward the mouth of the corridor. 

Jack felt a creepy sensation in his spine, as the electrical charge intensified. Something was up there, ahead of them, and the creatures in the walls were watching and waiting for it, maybe frozen in the middle of walking toward it. Maybe they were watching him, too, guiding him forward like prison wardens or guards. 

For a moment, Jack felt panic lurch in his stomach, wondering if these beasts could all come to life. If they could break free of the walls in a flurry of fur and claws, and growling, tear him to pieces here in the corridor. He’d been mauled by a dinosaur once, and he really didn’t wish to repeat the experience. 

Jack swallowed down the anxiety rooting in his stomach. Cautiously he moved, stepping forward again, putting his feet in front of each other and warily watching the wall. What else could he do? The creatures with their feathers and claws merely stood in their formations, letting him pass them. Four by four, column by column and row by row, he walked by and studied their forms: an alien bird, a feathered man, a turtle. 

Meanwhile, the thrumming in his head continued, and the sensation built from an itch to a pulse, throbbing in his hands and in the broken toe. He felt like he was being driven through a maze to face a Minotaur. With the burning ache in his joints, he knew there something more insidious ahead of him than just a creature or demon. It could be the radiation that had drawn the Tardis off course. 

Quiet voices began filtering down from one of the rooms ahead of him. A door opened with a thick metal clunk, and another set of orange lizards stepped into the corridor. Jack pressed himself against the wall and watched them huddle in conversation, beside a doorway. He couldn’t make out any words, just chirps and growls.

It was time to find a hiding place, so he ducked into the next doorway. Through the glass pane in the door, he could see the outlines of large machines, all sleek metal with glowing screens, scrolling with data. But when he reached for the handle and tried to let himself in, it was like reaching into shards of glass. He felt the gunshot in his lungs again. The gasp without breath, then the reeling, dizzy and feverish, and the horror at losing control over his limbs and watching his own blood and guts spill on the floor. 

Despite the feeling, he could see his arm and knew he was still intact. He tried reaching out to the door handle, but it pushed him away like he was on the wrong side of a magnet. Stuck between the two magnetic poles, his stomach lurched like he might be sick. He grappled forward with sheer willpower, his fingernails scraping at the door like a child might scratch at the sand while the tide yanked him out to sea. 

Gagging for air, Jack threw the weight of his body forward, diving in against the magnetic flux that threatened to push him away, and shoving open the door. He sucked in a breath and went under, letting the vector field crash over him, and in the chaos, he reached out until his fingers caught hold of something solid. Then the horrible pressure of it subsided, and he sucked in that first breath of life again, and wrenched his eyes open.

He was grasping the edge of a metal table, not unlike the autopsy cot he’d woken up on. On the wall before him, banks of monitors showed columns and rows of data and charts, constantly shifting through numbers. Underneath the monitors, shelves and stacks of servers blinked and hummed, filling the room with a buzzing noise like a horde of bees. 

But what really caught his eye was the blinding glow to his left, like the entire wall was missing, and a dim star had taken its place. This must be it, Jack thought. This room was the source of the massive radiation spike, the time tracks, and the feeling that his nerve endings wanted to crawl away from his muscular tissue and jump around on the floor like the larvae found in first-Earth Mexican jumping beans. 

All this tech was beautiful and mind-boggling. With a buzz of nostalgia, Jack thought back to the work of his Torchwood team, centuries ago in Cardiff. Toshiko Sato and her brilliant Rift predictions, Suzie and her obsession with that glove, and that glint in Ianto Jones’s eyes as he learned about the Hub’s secret weapons. It had all been rather brilliant, but then they’d all been caught up in the war, and he’d lost them. The universe continued on in its incredible way, too, and he just wished they were still here with him, to see it all.

But then Jack’s thoughts cleared and he realized that among all the fancy tech, he was also now confronted with more of the same orange, looming lizards. They tilted their heads, having heard the door, and probably his ragged breathing. Their black talons clicked on the tables, and he heard the hissing of their long tongues that reached out toward him like red streamers. 

But more troublesome than their pointed tongues or their eyes glinting yellow were their semi-automatic weapons, pointed at his forehead. 

“Not again,” Jack muttered.


	7. Chapter 7

Bullets ricocheted off the metal walls, with a clang and echo. Rolling under the table, the floor hard against his shoulder, Jack narrowly avoided getting riddled with holes like an alien Swiss cheese. 

Under the table, Jack pushed off the floor and launched a swift kick to one of the lizards’ knees. As it lost balance, hovered, and collapsed, Jack pulled himself out from the other side of the table and grabbed the gun out of its flailing arms, as it fell. 

This particular weapon wasn’t familiar, but the weight and movements of it he recognized, and he swiftly clicked a lever back into place. The safety was back on the gun, and Jack dropped to the floor, setting the gun down and pushing it away from himself. With a metal scrape, it slid and spun out of the fray toward an open patch of the floor. 

The lizard he’s kicked writhed on the ground, but the other beast was still standing there, clutching its weapon, aiming it vaguely at Jack’s chest. Jack’s breath was too deep, and the weight of it painful in his chest, and he was certain that any minute another bullet might puncture his ribs and deflate his lungs like the pop of a balloon. He couldn’t do it again, not this soon. 

Without pausing to think further, Jack reached for the gun and side-stepped its aim, pushing the barrel away from his chest and pointed safely toward the wall. He yanked at the weapon, but it wouldn’t come free of the creature’s claws. They both tugged for a moment. But then the second lizard, the one he’d kicked, started to stand again, its head scaley and its eyes narrowed. 

Jack abruptly shifted his balance. Instead of tugging, he surged forward, pushing against the beast. And it worked. The creature toppled, squealing, backwards into the other beast, and they both flailed like dominoes down onto the floor. Jack held his ground, carefully squatting and balancing his weight on his thighs, as the lizards went flying. Their grip loosened, until Jack was left holding the second weapon. 

Their ridged backs were round like turtles, and they couldn’t get to their feet quickly. Jack took advantage of the moment, pushing a heavy boot down on the first one’s chest. “Still want more of a beating, do you?” he growled. 

“That door was locked!” it retorted. “How did you even get in?” 

It tried to grab his ankle, but Jack kicked its gut again, and it writhed in pain, its tail flailing side to side in sweeping spasms. Jack still held the gun, but the second lizard was already on its feet and moving behind him. Spiny claws sank into his deltoid, and a sharp pain shot down his arm. Instinctively, Jack bent his knees, ducking his head. With his free hand, he reached over his shoulder, scrabbling at the folds of the beast’s cloak and yanking it forward. The lizard fell, toppling forward over Jack’s shoulder and onto the floor. 

Both lizards lay stunned for the moment, and Jack panted, watching them, and wiping sweat off his face. Quickly he disengaged the second gun and slid it toward its partner, the other gun, on the floor. “Oh, I’m good,” he murmured. He could imagine an impressed smirk on River’s face or Amy’s. Best not to think about that little eyebrow raise Ianto would have given him, and the feisty sex they could have had after this. 

But he had to get them restrained quickly before they came at him again. He looked around, and found a table full of spare bits of electronics and tools. There was a pile of computer cables. He grabbed these and bound the lizards together with the long blue Ethernet cables, twisting their arms safely behind their backs. For good measure, he gagged them too with thinner black wires. Their long red tongues curled around the bonds, and they hissed, but it would be a while before they could cut themselves free or get help. 

The room was stuffy, and Jack wiped sweat off his face once he’d finished. Now he had time to look around. It was hot and stuffy in the room. No wonder, since a good third of the ceiling was lit up like there was a star on the other side blaring through. The glow was mottled and mesmerizing, streaming with flares of light, and twinkling like an army of nanogenes. Beautiful. Ominous. 

What the hell was he looking at? From the edge of the light, a column of cables and vacuum tubes coiled down along the wall and draped all the way down to the ground. Jack ran his fingers along them, and they reacted to his touch, bubbling and undulating like a living rubber. There were organisms that could do that, creatures that acted like a solid until they came in contact with living tissue, and then in defense, turned suddenly to plasma. 

Jack didn’t touch them again—they could be poisonous, or suck in part of your flesh and eat your living skin. Or he could break them without meaning to, maybe cutting off life support in the room or letting the full force of the radiation wave through the wall. He didn’t need to lose any more limbs tonight, thanks, so he kept on following the mass of tubes across the floor. 

The tubes plugged into the bank of computers that he’d seen when he’d first looked through the door. These machines lined the walls, screen after screen of data scrolling with numbers and figures, and whirring and humming. There was a wealth of information here, if only you knew how to read it. “One problem,” he said aloud, scratching his head. “What the hell does all this mean?” 

He looked around at the lizards, then picked up one of the guns that he’d kicked aside earlier. “I don’t know how to use this,” Jack warned these alarmed lizards, “so who knows what I might do? Blow a hole in the space-time continuum? Channel the energy of the sun through your skull?” He cocked the gun. “I’m here for information. You’re somehow channeling the energy from that wall through your machines, so tell me. Is it a generator? A battery? What’s it all for?”

The angry lizards chomped around the bit he’d fastened on their mouths, and Jack cut one of them free so it could talk. “We’re just scientists,” the creature hissed, its eyes narrowing, “Studying the gamma radiation. Capturing the energy. Harnessing it. Let us go, we won’t hurt you.” 

“Funny, I recently asked for the same favor, and in return all I got was a bullet to the chest.” Jack looked back at the machinery without lowering his weapon. “All right, so let me guess, it’s powering the facility?”

In front of him, he watched the lizards struggle. The first one tried to give an answer, but the other squealed and rocked against their bonds, nearly knocking them both over. Clearly he didn’t want his partner to talk. 

“Listen!” Jack growled in anger. “As fun as it is to watch two alien lizards having a domestic, I’ve got to get on with it.” 

They just glared, so he whirled back to look at the machines, to puzzle it out for himself. But there were no keypads or controls. “It’s touch screen, isn’t it?” he asked over his shoulder. Sure enough, when he ran a palm and fingertips across it, the displays shifted into charts and icons. He laughed, sifting through the graphs, trying to read the unfamiliar script. “Gotta love the apps on these things!” 

As he moved from screen to screen, he noticed a glow beneath him, and the screens shifted again. “Look at you!” More purposefully, he shuffled his feet again and watched the floor light up. He tried a syncopated swing step, saw the floor lit in greens and blues under his boots, and then found the displays had changed again, to show round diagnostic graphs, pressure gauges and voltage meters. “Look at you!” he said, amazed.

The lizards hissed louder behind him. Jack felt like he was on stage, the main performer to a captive audience. He tried a shuffling moonwalk, and the displays paused, scrolling more slowly. “Ha!” Then he tried a stomping Gangnam style, complete with the arm movements of a particularly bad bull rider, and the screens shifted to new charts and tables, pulsing with energy. 

Soon his feet were moving all over the floor, trying every dance step he could think of from a Viennese waltz to breakdance, and he’d seen a lot of data go by on screen that he didn’t understand. This was more than just touch control—this was an integrated, full-body system, probably with hundreds of possible readings to scroll through. He couldn’t read the foreign script, or the pictographs that looked similar to the characters on the wall outside.

“Marvelous!” He laughed. “Not my dancing. I’m out of practice. But these magic machines? I’m impressed.” He turned around to look at the lizards, again, “A little too impressed.” 

They were watching and listening to him carefully, and he kept talking, hoping he could coax out a response. “If I’m not mistaken,” he said, “And I could be, because this here looks more like a fern than a number. But if I’m reading these gauges correctly, you’re collecting one hell of a lot of power. And one Hell? That’s a unit of measure I can understand.” 

He kept moving, past the displays, toward the far wall. “It’s too complex, though, for me to figure out all on my own. But what’s over here? What else are you hiding from the Captain?” 

He caught his breath, staring. A giant stone mandala covered the entire far wall, engraved with creatures like those on the wall outside. But here they were arranged in a circle, running, nose to tail to nose, stacked in concentric circles, all orbiting one face at the mandala’s center. This beast at the center was sticking out its tongue like an angry teenager or a reckless trickster god, as if mocking Jack for being so baffled. 

Jack ran his fingers across the wall. Oh, he knew it was a digital 3d display, but it still felt cool like stone. His fingers caught in the grooves as if it were really carved, and he noticed all the creatures were imprisoned there. Columns or arrows pointed out to a border that held them inside the stone circle, like a hamster in a ball. 

But he wasn’t sure what he was looking at, exactly. They could be prisoners, or they could be demons and demigods. Or they could be an alphabet, documenting the operations of the computer servers as they hummed, cataloguing the massive stores of energy coming from the glowing ceiling panel.

And then there was one more, vast wall-to-ceiling machine plugged into the twirling mandala. These cables and circuits twined together around a central column that hummed and pulsed with light. Its cogs and cables and gears were engraved with the same animal symbols, like labels. Peering closer, Jack could make out components like the time altimeters and inertial dampeners in Toshiko’s rift computers, or his own Vortex hopper, or his favorite ship of all, the Doctor’s Tardis. 

He recognized this, at least. “Oh,” Jack breathed, “These were dangerous toys for scientists. I don’t believe in myths and magic. But I’ve met old demons. I don’t need to read the numbers. This world is falling out of balance.” 

The ambitious project in front of him was still every bit as powerful and dangerous as Abbadon or the 4-5-6. The eye-patch bitch and her reptile technicians were channeling radiation from the sky, and using it to fuel time travel. This kind of energy could restore his vortex hopper a hundred times over. 

More devastating, it could zap a planet’s atmosphere and render it toxic. That could cause an ice age and the genocide of all that world’s inhabitants. Unfortunately, he still had no idea how to shut it down. 

Before he could investigate it more, a loud clang and footsteps echoed in from the corridor. The prisoners were still indisposed, tied up and hissing uselessly. In four swift strides, Jack reached them, gripped their bonds and dragged them behind a table, out of sight of the door. 

Then, he had just enough time to look around and grab the largest weapon in the room to defend himself. It was there on the center table, surrounded by other bits and bobbles and tools. The gun was easily three times the size of the little doodads the lizards had threatened him with, and its weight felt even and balanced in his hands as he studied it. Although unfamiliar, it must function similar to the old sonic blaster he’d used long ago, with the Time Agency. 

The door swung open with a whine, startling Jack. 

“What in hell do you think you’re doing with the gamma prototype?” The voice was raspy, and this lizard looked like the others, except her scales were blue, not orange. “And who the flash do you think you are? Talk quick, because there’s a prisoner on the loose.” 

Jack was grateful he was wearing a matching uniform and carrying the larger gun. “Did you shine your scales today?” he gave his best grin. “You’re looking gorgeous.” He brandished the blaster innocently. “It’s just, Madame Kovarian asked me to collect this piece, you know, as a demonstration for her new toys in the dungeon.” 

He raised an eyebrow. A little flirting and a little camaraderie might just do the trick. He’d gotten killed for this tactic before, but he’d also gotten laid on a number of occasions. And her scales, shining blue, really were distracting.

The creature flicked its tongue and bobbed its head with a little wave of its arm. In other lizards, the gesture might be a sign of sexual receptivity. “It would be just like her to test it out on real subjects, just as we’ve barely got the thing working,” she sighed. 

Jack detected annoyance—if it were human, he thought, it would be rolling its eyes. So he shrugged, every bit the put-upon soldier. “You know the drill, I just take orders.”

“Very well. Go on then.” And the lizard moved aside and let him pass. “But don’t say we didn’t warn her. The results are not pretty!”

“Oh, don’t worry, I will warn her,” Jack returned. He winked. “Maybe later, you and I can get a drink?” And with his most charming smirk (patented on three planets, and once offered as the featured prize in an intergalactic women’s wrestling match), he was off, striding swiftly and smoothly down the corridor. He didn’t want to let on he had a limp, and more importantly, he really didn’t want to be anywhere nearby when the lizard found its friends tied up under the table. 

The trouble was, Jack had no idea where he was, or for that matter where he was going.


	8. Chapter 8

“Doctor!” called Amy, as he dragged her by the hand through the jungle. It had seemed beautiful before, but now she saw snakes on every vine, and thorns and rocks by her feet, and was scared she might stumble.

“Pond?” he called back to her.

“Where are we going?” she lurched to a stop.

“It’s time to pay a visit to this planet’s other visitors. Introduce ourselves. Make sure the Captain and your husband haven’t gotten themselves in trouble. Oh, what am I saying? ‘Course Jack has.”

“Please don’t go in there!” Olain was following them. “Not to the visitor’s compound. The star’s energy will turn you to ashes and dust.”

“Don’t you worry,” the Doctor turned on him, pointing a finger. 

“We don’t wish you to sacrifice yourselves,” Olain told him.

The Doctor shook his pointer finger. “That’s not in the plan. Let’s not talk any more of sacrifices, hear me?”

“There’s no plan, Doctor, is there?” Amy asked. 

“Well, in so far as there is a plan, it involves Not Getting Sacrificed. No dying. That’s the plan today. And every day. So yes, there’s a plan, and it hasn’t changed. Same plan as always!” Oh, Amy thought, they’d reached the Doctor Babbling phase. Certainly there was a grand scheme he would think up soon, but for now, the modus operandii just involved panicking and ranting.

“At least wait,” Olain begged. “Wait a while for the others to catch up.” Olain was panting, his face red, as he appealed the Doctor to listen to reason. 

The older shaman Kerrick had followed them, “Yes, wait!” she agreed, looking at Amy rather than the Doctor. “Shanti’s behind us, and the others.”

Amy looked around and realized most of the villagers hadn’t been able to keep up with the Doctor’s breakneck pace. Crow, too, had fallen behind, and Amy felt suddenly guilty. She remembered the look on his face as the Doctor had stormed out of that cave, and that shake of his head. “That dude’s nuts,” Crow had said, loud enough for all to hear. She couldn’t, in all fairness, disagree.

Now the Doctor stuck out his jaw, and she couldn’t tell if he was about to admit to being wrong, or insist on having his way. 

“We’ll wait. All right. We’re waiting.” He paced around the shadowed glade of trees, his feet stomping up dust and twigs and leaves. “He’s my responsibility now,” he muttered. “They all are.”

Amy followed a pace behind him “What are you on about? Is Rory all right?”

“How should I know!?” the Doctor threw up his hands. “Much as I want to go check, there’s Crow to think of, and these people here.” 

The wind picked up in the trees, and a few minutes passed. The Doctor paced, his mouth twisting. Amy kept silent at first, watching his mind spin, as he worked out a plan. She watched the angle of the light shifting, casting longer shadows, growing darker amidst the jungle canopy.

Still there was sunshine, but the wind grew louder, and Amy grew more nervous. There was the patter of the leaves, that dripping of trees and the roar of a stream, and for all the world it sounded like a rainstorm, but nothing around them had changed. “Doctor, it’s not raining,” Amy said. “So what’s all the noise?” 

“You’re right,” the Doctor finally said. He looked up into the jungle behind them. “It’s not raining. The village is coming.”

“The village?” Olain turned around and looked behind them. Still the noises continued, and even grew. There were voices now, shouting through the leaves. Faces began to appear, the village men with red cheeks dripping with sweat, their mouths open and shouting. 

“What’s wrong?” Kerrick called but there was no coherent answer. Some of the men, and the woman that followed them, carried young children in their arms. Crow was running with Jye beside them, and they were dragging children in each hand. 

The Doctor was spinning around. “What’s going on?” he asked the crowd, but they only stood around him in a circle. They looked panicked, hot, dazed. 

One of the women approached first, speaking to Kerrick and Olain, “I’m so sick,” she said, holding her stomach. Her long hair hung, matted and wet with sweat, plastered against the side of her face. “Please, why are we running?”

Olain took a step toward the girl, and she leaned heavy against him, as he wrapped an arm around her and pulled her to warmth and safety against himself. “It’s all right. Kerrick?”

Kerrick watched, then wheeled around as she was called on for her healing potions. She tore a leaf from one of the thick, spiky plants nearby. “Take this,” she said. “Each of you, pick a leaf from the Crassula. When you turn around, when you feel ill and can’t remember, mark a tally on your arm, like we do on the trees. Each time you see a creature, mark your arm!”

She handed leaves around, and Amy looked around to find another similar plant nearby, and began handing out leaves to the villagers. “Those creatures,” she guessed. “We need to count them?”

Kerrick nodded her assent. “Yes. I’m going back for the others. Now, remember.”

“I will,” Amy promised. She backed up then, toward the Doctor and spoke quietly. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on? Who are those creatures? Why would they chase us and disappear, and why don’t we remember them?”

“Of course I’ll tell you,” he said, reassuringly, as Kerrick ran off way they’d come. “That is, when I figure it out myself.”

\--

Rory was still trapped in a corridor, in the basement of a foreign compound populated by evil lizard men. He’d escaped a prison cell only to find himself face to face with a weeping angel, who was now stalking him. He’d led it here, to this hallway where the figures on the canvasses stood and watched. And then he’d blinked. He hoped that the Angel would be held in place by their acrylic and oil-based stares. 

When he opened his eyes, everything looked the same. The Angel hadn’t moved, frozen in place by the watchful eyes of statues and paintings in the hall all around her. 

It seemed that the angel couldn’t tell the difference between a person watching her and a painting staring back. Rory hoped that he was safe for now, but he was still unwilling to turn his back entirely, so he started to walk backwards, in the other direction down the corridor. The hallway receded as he moved, slowly, step by step, not taking his eyes off the creature. Then he saw another corner opening up beside him, and felt the wall against his back. 

He stood there for a moment, still not daring to look away. The figure looked small on the other side of the corridor. It stood dark grey, solitary, and fully still. He shut his eyes again and opened them.

She hadn’t moved. “Good then,” he told himself. “All right.” And then because there was no one watching, Rory Williams reached one hand around his shoulder and gave himself a pat on the back.

“All right, planet: next obstacle?” he asked. But he already knew the answer: he still needed to find a way out.

This next twist of corridor seemed to wind upward in a lazy slope. Doors here were strangely tilted, and the walls changed from painted white to grey to metal in a seamless gradient. They grew shinier, constructed of some alien compound, no doubt. And then he began to see small creatures etched in the walls, drawn larger and larger as he walked. They were some type of alien or animal, composed all of angles and paws, all feathers and teeth. He wondered if they were stylized, or there were really creatures who looked like them. Anything in the Universe was possible.

Finally, he saw something: a light, bluer and brighter, was shining out from under a door. The doorknob felt warm to the touch. Sunlight streamed in as he pulled it open, and he blinked furiously into the sudden sunshine with a happy sigh of relief. Outside. He’d found outside. Sunshine, and freedom, and somewhere out there, was Amy and the Doctor.

Rory took a step and caught a glimpse of sand and dirt ground. Then there were black, polished boots of soldiers with enormous feet, and then claws sunk into his bicep and twisted him, pushing him back indoors. 

Rory cursed again. 

The hissing sound in his ears was more than just the pain that shot through his arm as it twisted into his flesh. It was the long, slender tongues of the lizard men, like the tskk-tssk reprimand from someone’s strict aunt. 

He stumbled as they shoved him, but another beast caught his other arm. There he was, between the two lizards, being dragged back toward his cell. But, he considered, at least he was no longer at the mercy of the Weeping Angel.

\---

Once again (and still) lost within a maze of corridors, in an alien compound in a far-off planet, Jack took a deep breath and thought of the Doctor. 

When they were alone, the Doctor always just called him Captain. The Doctor even confessed once that he thought of it as a Time Lord name; as if, in absorbing part of the Vortex and stealing a fixed thread of the universe for himself, Jack had earned the right to follow the customs of that ancient Academy on Gallifrey, whether or not his DNA agreed. Maybe because they both were destined to live long lives, Jack and the Doctor had bonded strongly enough to feel like they were of the same race, even though their birthplaces, parents and experiences were so vastly different.

He clung to the name now, as if it imbued him with some influence or authority, and tried to think like a Captain as he continued down the corridor. How would he get Rory free? How would he escape and find the Doctor? 

The corridors seemed to undulate instead of continuing straight, and Jack followed the animal spirits on the walls. They were changing size, alternating poses, as if they were running, getting closer to their prize.

There were warrior creatures with feathers and smaller animals like lizards. There were others with many limbs like tentacles sticking out in all directions. One reminded him of an Octomanoid he’d met once, all silky skin and limbs that liked to curl and push. (All in all, it had been an enlightening evening, and definitely satisfying.)

But he wasn’t sure if these particular creatures were imaginary or real. One glyph in particular caught his attention, a bipedal figure with a helmeted head, lacking any feathers or tentacles. Its garb was reminiscent of a Roman soldier, with shield and tunic and spear. 

Jack couldn’t be sure, but he’d heard the stories of Rory the Roman—laughingly told by the Misses, with a hint of mockery and an equal measure of awe and adoration. And the resemblance, although admittedly slight, seemed too significant to ignore.

Jack continued in the same direction, this time keeping a closer eye on these symbols. He wasn’t superstitious, but he’d started to feel more at ease under their guidance. Surely even the Doctor couldn’t begrudge him his instincts. The same symbol seemed to repeat further down, in other poses, and other signs began to grow familiar, as if placed in a pattern on the walls. 

The lights from the ceiling were fading, and the floor seemed to slope downwards. For all he knew, this base was built on another dimension like the Tardis, and was larger than it looked from the exterior. He might be descending toward the dungeon—or the building itself could be tricking him, ready to devour him whole. There were no windows showing the direction of the sun. Dying sometimes curdled his thoughts like this, making everything seem ominous. 

Yet finally, turning another corner, a broad hallway opened in front of him. Jack ducked back just in time as he saw a set of lizards moving about. They were wielding chains of some kind. Jack slunk on the wall, clutching his ray gun to his chest, and tried to get a closer glimpse.

They had a stone statue, wrapped in chains, and were hoisting it onto a platform, and next to it, a large painting. So they had other prisoners. But strange, to see them worrying about art too, in a laboratory complex like this. He watched as they shifted the artifacts into a nearby room, and even the crowd of guards followed, although clearly they were not doing much of anything besides watching the proceedings. 

When they all trooped in the room and the door shut, Jack made his way quickly and quietly down toward the hallway. Once there, he looked at the artifacts and his blood chilled. There were paintings of alien races from across the galaxies. There were friends among them in the Shadow Proclamation, but the majority were enemies of the Doctor, baddies that he’d prefer to never encounter again. There too were the malformed, gaseous figures of the 4-5-6, coated in their unique compound of snot, painted in all-too-colorful detail.

Disgusted, Jack turned and continued at double the speed. He wanted nothing more than to get out of here and be done, and make his way safely back to the Tardis. Here he had been traveling, thinking he’d been able to put it all behind him, all his time on Earth and all the people he’d loved. Now grief was threatening to tumble through him again, and he realized he’d never quite get past it. 

So it was just as well that a little way down he saw more figures. The backs of their black coats were lined up in a neat row. Their shoulders were raised, and a booming voice was calling out. “Prepare for execution!”

Through the wall of murderous lizards, just between their heads, Jack could make out the terrified face of a certain skinny, blonde-haired human male, a certain companion of the Doctor, whom he recognized by the name of Rory Pond. 

He didn’t have a moment to spare. He clenched his fists around his weapon, steeling all his gut-wrenching grief into a stubborn anger. 

The Captain pushed his way through the guards. “Hold your fire!” he bellowed, holding up his own gun. They flicked their tongues at him, and Jack reached between their shoulders. Rory grasped at Jack’s outstretched, broad palm, and let himself be yanked through the startled lizards. 

“I’ve been told this gun has some technical problems and might explode.” Jack held the weapon aloft. “So in all our best interests, you’ll have to let us go now. Understood?”


	9. Chapter 9

The lizard creatures had let them go, but Rory and Jack were still slogging through the corridors, trying to find the way out. “It’s just up here, they said,” Rory murmured.

“Assuming we can trust them,” Jack answered. “They could be sending us to the slaughterhouse, for all we know. And, I’ve been there once already today, so let’s not make it a habit.”

“We don’t have much else to go by.”

“Can’t argue with that.” Jack tossed him a smile and hefted the gamma gun in his hands. “Lead on, Centurion.”

“Yes, Captain.” 

But as they turned another corner, he drew to a halt suddenly. 

“Woah!” Jack nearly bowled him over, and steadied himself with his hands on Rory’s shoulders. For the first time, he noticed how deliciously slight the Roman was. “What is it?” Jack asked. 

Rory’s shoulders rose and fell with rapid breaths as he took a few steps closer to one of the open doors, peering in a room adjacent to the corridor. “It’s a Weeping Angel. It was chasing me earlier.”

Jack looked in the room. There stood the statue he had seen earlier guarded by an entourage of lizard soldiers, but now it was alone in the room, hooked up to cables and machines. Its wings were spread, its face covered by stony hands, and behind it was another glowing wall. In front of it stood other paintings and statues.

“Thought they were a myth,” Jack said. 

“Amy’s told me about them,” Rory said. “They eat time energy. So when it chased me, I trapped it next to that painting of the man staring out at it.” 

“Don’t blink?” Jack whispered, remembering the legends. “But if it’s just a painting, that wouldn’t work. It would have to be alive.” 

“How can it be alive?” 

Jack shrugged. “If they’re storing this radiation, like a battery, capturing time energy, it’s only natural that would lure in a Weeping Angel. Look at it. Hooked up to machines. They must be collecting energy off the angel now. They’ve captured it and harnessed its life blood.”

“Does it have blood?”

“Figure of speech,” Jack shrugged. “I thought it was just a statue when I first saw it. And we thought that was just a painting. But they all must be alive. So they’re harnessing all its energy for something. But what?” 

Helplessly, Rory shrugged next to him. Jack tugged on his arm, and they kept walking. 

“We can’t just shut this place down,” Jack mused. “It has more than one power source, so even if we destroy one, the other might still be flickering and live. And if we tried to blow it up, we could tear open a rift or destroy the planet.”

“That sounds bad.”

“Yeah. It could throw other worlds out of their gravity fields. Utter chaos in the universe.”

“So once we get out of here, what should we do?”

“We find the Doctor,” Jack answered. 

\---

Amy and Crow were tending the sick. Children doubled over, clutching their stomachs. Men and women crying and clutching each other. And nearby, women with angry faces were cutting switches from the trees, preparing to defend themselves. Only, preparing for what?

“Don’t let them get us.” The woman who’d been leaning against Olain was pleading. “It’s not safe out there. It hasn’t been safe in our forest for so long.”

“It’s the river,” Crow told Amy, as if in confidence. “Almost every culture has a myth of the river. Once you cross the river, things happen. Sometimes you age. Some rivers are the borders of the underworld. Like the Aztec’s Mictlan.”

She didn’t recognize the word, and she’d never much studied mythology. Amy was more interested in history, where she’d always looked for signs of the Doctor’s work. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“It’s not safe, it’s not right,” Crow was nearly talking to himself now, shaking his head, losing his mind. When Amy tried to reach out to him, he pulled away and turned toward the children again. 

“Give them this,” Shanti, the younger shaman, appeared by Amy’s side and pressed a bundle of some long, fluffy grass into Amy’s hands. With a reassuring voice, she advised, “Have them chew the stalks. It will help the sick. Until they come, and then,” she shook her head. “I don’t know, maybe there’s no helping us then.”

“Until who come?” Amy asked, but the young woman had already moved on, reaching out to a man who was pale and ill, clutching at a tree nearby. 

The Doctor was still pacing, glaring around him at the villagers, doing his thinky-things. He seemed so self-centered sometimes, Amy thought, as if solving the puzzle was all that mattered. Meanwhile, around them the entire tribe looked sick and confused. She wanted to shake him and ask, was he a Doctor or not?

At least Shanti had given her something useful to do, so she start passing out the stalks to some of the elder children nearby. She approached a crowd of them all huddled together—a few older girls at the center, and a host of smaller ones of all sizes surrounding them, with fear- and tear-streaked cheeks. “Hey,” Amy said, awkwardly, to the oldest of them, “Chew on these, all right? It’s going to be all right.” 

“It won’t be,” the girl answered, and grabbed all the leaves from Amy’s outstretched hand. Then, protectively, the child began doling out stalks to the younger ones, starting with the toddlers. The children waited patiently with their hands extended. But not everyone was given a stalk of grass. There weren’t enough, and the girl gave a few each to her friends her own age. 

Amy wanted to protest but decided not to interfere. She began looking around for more of the fuzzy grasses, and then another voice called out. “They’re here!” 

Amy spun around again. Tall, purple-faced skeletons stood along the hillside in a swarm. They stood rigid like trees, and their faces were twisted and cold. They wore long cloaks, and their eye sockets were deep pits. Some weird power gathered there in the skulls, like the blue tinge of dark clouds before an electrical storm. Amy’s stomach turned. “Oh, Doctor,” she managed to call out, reaching for him. 

The Doctor wrapped an arm around her, steadying her, as the swarm of skeletons moved toward them and Amy’s knees buckled.

Olain was nearby, pleading with the Doctor too. “You stay. Help our sick. We will fight them. We have warriors.”

But the Doctor shook his head and turned away from Olain and the villagers. Instead, he took a few determined steps toward the skeletons, who were opening their mouths. When they spoke, it felt like a dull hiss rattling through the air, like grasses rustling in a harsh wind. “It’s time,” the one skeleton said. “You come with us. Doctor, it’s your turn to die.”

“What are you on about, you bag of bones?” the Doctor called back. His hand was tight around Amy’s fingers.

“Doctor, what are they?” Amy asked, without taking her eyes off the creatures.

“I don’t know. Get everyone behind me,” he said, and carefully extricated himself, as she stood on her own. 

Amy turned around, reaching out to Crow and Olain. “Keep the people back. Tend the sick. Hold onto the children.” Then she turned again, confused, feeling sick herself. “Doctor? Why?”

She turned back, and caught sight of the skeletons again. “Oh, my god, Doctor, what are they!?”

“I don’t know, Amy,” he said, patiently, his eyes never leaving the creatures on the hillside.

Amy shook herself, feeling nauseous and dizzy. “Have I said that before?” she wondered.

“It’s time,” the Silent repeated. “We are the Silence.” Its voice was harsh and alien, like tree branches rubbing and grinding together. “We’ve killed your Captain Harkness. Your other companion is our prisoner. You shall come with us. You and the others.” 

“They’re not coming with you,” the Doctor argued. “Why are you invading this planet?”

“Doctor, so young! So naïve! We’ve come for _you_ ,” said another voice. It was almost a human’s voice, a woman’s, and it seemed to be laughing. Her face was wrinkled, middle-aged. Her dress was black. She spat his name like a disgusting word. “Doctor.” 

“You’ve heard of me then.” The Doctor drew his screwdriver out of a pocket and aimed it at them. “Are you ready?”

“Oh, the infamous screwdriver! I’m so frightened,” the woman said. Then her voice lowered into a growl. “We’ve seen the future you’ve created, Doctor, and we’re here to prevent it. Come along. It’s for the best.”

The Doctor pressed the button on his screwdriver with a vicious stab, and it released a sonic squeal, ringing out across the jungle. Over the sound of it, the skeleton creatures began to howl. There was a crashing, like the sound of trees falling, splitting open from the trunk and collapsing on the ground. There was the sound of ocean waves smashing up shells on the shore. And screams from the villagers, clutching their ears to protect themselves. 

Amy turned around at the screaming and reached behind her for the children. “It’s going to be all right,” she repeated. But she kept facing the creatures, keeping an eye on them. It wasn’t safe to let them out of her sight. She’d just forget them again.

Watching the people writhe and recoil in fear, she wished Rory were there to help. They needed a nurse, now. Some of the children were pale and ill.

The Doctor could heal people, but right now he was too busy being the brave one, confronting these beasts. The skeletons were reaching out their hands. Electricity sparked between their two knobby fingers, arcing out to catch small bushes nearby on fire. 

“No, you don’t,” the Doctor muttered. He changed a settling on the screwdriver, blasting it toward the fires. The orange licks of flame were extinguished, leaving only curls of grey smoke rising from the brush. Watching their work dissolve, the creatures howled. 

Oh, Amy knew the Doctor loved every minute of it—being the brave one, out in front of the crowd, talking them down. Being the hero, without resorting to violence. For once, it made her irritated rather than proud. These people needed help, and he was showing off.

“He is a mighty warrior!” Another voice in her ear, and Amy turned to see Kerrick beside her. She was smiling, looking relieved and pleased. Her one good eye flashed large and green, catching the light. Caught up in the Doctor’s spell.

“But he hates fighting,” Amy said, “Don’t you see? He’ll only talk to them.”

“We’ll be safe now,” Kerrick said, squeezing her shoulder. Then she winked and turned away.

The Doctor was still scanning the creatures as they faced him. “You’re psychic. You make people sick. And you’re boiling in artron energy, and arcing with gamma waves. But how? Why?” He waved the screwdriver about, frowning at its readouts.

“It’s all for you!” the woman on the hillside called. “I must be going. I trust my pets can show you around.” She turned and disappeared under the shade of the trees. But the skeletons pushed forward again in tentative steps toward them.

“Amy,” the Doctor called, his arms waving, and taking a stumbling step backward. “I think maybe we’d better run.”

 

\---

Jack and Rory finally did find their way outside. They blinked into the bright sun, and coughed on the dust that kicked up under their feet. Jack was still barefoot and he unbound the tape over his toes. 

“They cut it off,” he told Rory, with a grin. “But it’s grown back.”

“That’s sick,” Rory said.

Jack wiggled his toes and didn’t stop to ask whether that was slang for cool, or if Rory really meant it was unhealthy. He put a hand on Rory’s shoulder, and they hurried forward, hugging the walls of the courtyard. There was no one outside, but any number of doors that could open any time. The building looked like a large U shape, like an enclosed fort, full of hallways and corridors and rooms adjacent to one another. No wonder they’d felt so lost. 

Finally they found the entrance they’d come in, the opening between the walls, and got a clear view to the forest beyond. There in the dust, the little girl was still playing. 

His wrist strap looked bulky and huge on her arm as she stood with her knife, lunging and lunging again as if killing a huge, imaginary creature. Jack pictured one of the cute fluffy animals in Monsters Inc or Where the Wild Things Are, some unsuspecting, gentle alien being slit neck to navel. He clutched at his own skin, still feeling the place where he’d been opened for autopsy earlier. 

He shared a look with Rory, then they moved forward together. “Hey,” he hissed at her, trying to get her attention but stay quiet. 

She looked over, surprised. 

Jack gave her his best, fun grin, and took her arm. “Come on. It’s a game.” Easily, while he still had her by surprise, he slipped the knife from her palm, and took her hand in his own. “Got a surprise for you! Let’s run.” He didn’t give her a choice. Dragging her along, he ran for the trees, barely stopping to make sure the Doctor’s pet Roman was behind him. 

The girl was quick on her feet and didn’t argue, not even when he pulled her through the hole in the fence and into the relative safety of the shade under the trees. “What are you!” she only asked, her light eyes wide with curiosity and her cheeks flushed from running. 

As they collapsed breathless in piles of leaves under the forest canopy, Jack and Rory looked at each other and laughed. 

“Just like you—something special!” Jack told her, as he found a spare, shielded pocket in his tunic to store the knife he’d nicked off her. “Know what this is?” he held up the gamma gun. 

She reached out a tentative hand and touched the cool, black metal. “That’s Madame’s favorite gun,” she said. “Why do you have it?”

“Oh, she gave it to me! It’s a gift.” Before she could re-think her new and curious trust in him, Jack took her hand and stood up again. “Come on. There’s someone I think you should meet.”

“Will you let me play with your gun?”

“Oh—maybe later. The results aren’t pretty, though!” Jack told her. “First, I’m going to need this back.” He pulled the Vortex manipulator from her wrist, and snapped it back on his own. At once, he felt a sense of relief, as if the universe had been dislocated around him and now snapped back into place. He’d had this tech for over 150 years, and didn’t feel like himself without it even when it had been drained of power. 

The girl looked annoyed, “Hey, that’s mine now. Finder’s keepers!”

“Come on, then,” he took her hand again before she could launch a full-scale tantrum, and pulled her along back through the jungle. The crunch of leaves underfoot reassured him that Roronicus the Roman was following. 

“If we can’t find him, we’ll have to find the Tardis,” Jack explained. “Come on, old girl, where are you?” 

\--- 

 

The Doctor’s nobby Adam’s apple bobbed as he gulped. The Silents were still there, a line of dark forbidding creatures shadowing the trees. And the villagers were all clustered, sick and dizzy and confused, nearby. “I really think we’d better run,” the Doctor repeated.

“Oh, are you thinking about it?” Amy asked. “Or do you actually want us to run?”

When the Doctor opened his mouth, it took another moment for any sound to come out. “Look!”

She followed his shaking finger. The Silents had turned, and were backing away sideways among the trees. That was strange, she thought.

“He makes them disappear,” Kerrick said, still in awe.

But Amy didn’t think it was the Doctor who was making the skeletons retreat like ghosts into the jungle. She squinted into the forest, trying to see more clearly.

Then she heard voices she recognized. “Amy!” her Rory, calling out, coming toward her through the trees. She saw Jack Harkness’ face first, his broad, bold shoulders pushing aside the broad, tall leaves of the jungle trees. Behind him, Rory strode forward with one hand in front of his face to protect himself from the same leaves. 

“Captain!” the Doctor called, pleased. 

The Doctor tugged Amy’s arm and they ran forward. She saw then that Jack and Rory weren’t alone. Jack was clutching the hand of a small child, a pale girl with stringy, dark hair. The girl marched forward at Jack’s side but all her attention was on the skeletons, and she was reaching out with her free hand, pointing toward them. She glared, looking imperious and pointing her stubby fingers, and weirdly they seemed to shrink away from her, finally disappearing completely among the trees.

But then Rory was there in front of Amy, and she swept him up in a hug. “Thank God you’re all right.”

“Haha!” Jack called. “Doctor!”

“Captain.” 

While Rory buried his face in Amy’s shoulder, she looked up to see the Doctor and Jack slapping each other on the back. And Jack stole a quick kiss from the Doctor’s ear. Of course, the Doctor made a face and rubbed the ear with his hand. 

Unbothered, Jack turned away with a grin still splitting his face, and shook Crow’s hand with gusto. “Jack Harkness, at your service.”

“I’m Crow. Crow Johnson. It’s a pleasure.”

Then they all turned and watched as the Doctor leaned down toward the child. “Well, hello! And who are you?”


	10. Chapter 10

“In the future,” the Doctor told the young girl, River Song, “We’re going to be friends.” 

Standing there, surrounded by jungle plants taller than herself, the girl just looked at him with wide, disbelieving eyes.

The Doctor stood back up, turning to his oldest friend. “Captain? An explanation?”

Jack described quickly, how they’d found River in the compound. How she’d threatened him, wielding a knife like she’d been trained for it, and how they’d been captured by giant lizard creatures with a medical fetish for immortal Captains. How he’d seen the technology to harvest the gamma radiation that was baking the planet, and the machinery to engineer time travel. “And when we finally escaped, she was still there playing. We couldn’t just leave her with them.”

“No,” the Doctor agreed, looking grim. “But we can’t take her with us, either.”

“You’ve made friends.” Jack nodded to where the villagers were crowded nearby. 

The Doctor and Amy followed his look and his meaning. Maybe River could stay here. Perhaps Jye or Olain would look after her. Amy squeezed the Doctor’s arm and nodded. “I’ll ask them,” she offered. 

“Brilliant, Pond!” the Doctor kissed Amy’s forehead, and then watched her go. Once again, he knelt down beside the girl. “Were you a prisoner there? Did they hurt you?”

River shook her head and said only, “Are you sure we’re friends?”

“Trust me,” said the Doctor. “If you’re ever in danger, you come find me. At this place and time.” He shut his eyes, and his gangly fingers reached for her temples. 

She watched his squashed nose and funny chin, and then her eyes widened as she found herself repeating a set of numbers. “You put numbers in my head!” 

“They’re coordinates,” the Doctor opened his eyes again, pulled his hands away, and grinned at her.

“It’s like a map?” she asked, holding her head as if she had a headache. There was something she couldn’t understand yet happening in her mind, but she suddenly had a feeling that she could picture the universe and especially one part of it that the Doctor had just shown her. Only it was like a dream, something she could remember vaguely, but wouldn’t ever be able to describe.

“Exactly right,” the Doctor agreed. “You follow them if you’re in trouble, and we’ll be there. Okay?”

That’s when River realized that her new idea of the universe was no longer a map of worlds and places from A to B, but had gotten tangled back and forward in a dizzying way. “You’re a time traveler!” she said. Then she scrunched up her face. “But how?”

“Spoilers!” The strange man ran a thumb over her chubby cheeks. Then he held out a hand to his friend in the huge grey coat. “Now, Jack, your watch.”

“Oi, that’s not fair! I only just got it back again!” The Captain sounded like a boy starting a tantrum.

The Doctor waved impatiently until the Captain handed over the wrist strap, and then he carefully drew it up River’s arm and tightened it down. “If you ever need to get away? Go north of here, and you’ll find a cave in the field, one that doesn’t belong there. It will make sense when you see it. You just press this watch to that tall crystal growing in the cave. Remember those numbers I told you? If you concentrate on them, it will take you there. All right?”

River nodded, and opened her mouth, and rattled off the numbers he’d given her, without understanding why. 

The Doctor nodded. “You’re going to be brilliant.” He smiled at her fondly. “Then I’ll see you again, River Song.”

He stood again, and gestured to Rory this time, and then he put the girl’s tiny hand in Rory’s big one. He nodded over where Amy was talking with Olain. “Go find your wife.”

Rory nodded and led the girl away. As the Doctor watched them, he felt a mix of emotions. It didn’t make sense and yet he knew, this little girl was his River. River Song, archaeologist. 

A hand settled on his shoulder, warm and sturdy, and the Doctor glanced back. Jack was watching him. 

“The steady Captain at my side?” the Doctor murmured.

“They’ll be fine,” Jack answered gently. “Do you want to hear the rest of what I saw?”

“Oh yes!” 

They sat down on a log nearby. Crow settled on a boulder beside them. And Jack explained what he’d seen and been through in more detail. Dying and reviving on an operating table. The long, confusing hallways. The sickness and dread that itched in his bones. The lizards. Their guns, and their computers. The animal symbols guiding him, or hunting him. And the large murals and paintings filled with those same creatures.

Crow listened for a while, nodding along with the Doctor, then grew restless. He stood up and paced around under the trees, then returned with a sharp stick. “Jack. Think you can draw those symbols you described? The animals with the feathers in the murals?” 

Jack had never thought himself much of an artist, but as he sketched in the dirt at their feet, Crow hummed and nodded. “They’re Aztec gods,” he explained, finally. “And your mural, I’m sure it’s their sacred calendar.”

“Huh,” Jack looked up. “I thought it looked familiar. It’s from Earth, then?”

“The Aztecs were an agricultural people,” Crow said. “They used a solar calendar, but they also had a second, religious calendar. The face at the center, surrounded by the symbols of the days, and then the rays of the sun. The thirteen day symbols and twenty god symbols are spun opposite each other, so each day is guided by one day sign and ruled over by one of the gods. The Aztecs separated the gods and gave them each a separate time to reign over, in order to keep peace among them and preserve the world’s balance.” 

“It’s old magic. Of course!” The Doctor said. “Remember, Captain, back in the Aztec jungle. You tried to get your vortex hopper working. We just assumed that it blew our circuits and yanked the Tardis off course.”

“Right,” Jack nodded. 

“But what if that energy was channeled down into the ground, into a cave beneath the mountain?” the Doctor continued. “A human couldn’t make a Tardis. You don’t have the technology. At its heart, the Tardis is alive. But what if once, all that energy was summoned, and sucked down into the Earth, and all the conditions were right? A Tardis could be sparked to life! And then, if it was left to grow for thousands of years?” 

“It was humming,“ Crow nodded. “The cave in the jungle. I could hear it, calling me.”

“And that was about 2000 years later,” the Doctor said.

“You’re saying we made another Tardis,” Jack grinned. 

“A half-formed one, anyway,” the Doctor shrugged. “Crow doesn’t have the Time Lord mind to control it. So once you activated it, it linked to one of the biggest sources of energy in the universe, and the same gods and powers that it recognized, and it came here. And all those signals bouncing back and forth were like an echo, calling my Tardis here.” The Doctor bounced on his feet, standing above Jack and the drawings in the soil.

Jack frowned. “There’s something else. When I woke up on that operating table, I heard them say, there’s another Time Lord. Besides you, and besides River Song.”

“Well, of course there is,” the Doctor nodded. He raised an eyebrow, and squeezed Jack’s elbow back. “Come on then. Hop skip. Jiggety jig. Geronimo!”

Jack didn’t have time to ask what he meant, because the Doctor was taking off again, running back through the jungle. Running to find Amy and Rory. Then all together, they were running back to the Tardis. 

From the Tardis console, they watched the planet beneath them spin and swirl, blue and green into the distance. There was a river down on that planet, winding among the trees. And River Song was down there, too, safe with Jye and Olain who would care for her. She might even become the youngest apprentice to the shamans. They had all seen that she had some special power and a special gift of sight now. 

“Hold on,” Rory said, as the time rotor rose and fell. “Are we running away? Without shutting that place down?” 

The Doctor exchanged a look with Jack. 

“We can’t shut them down,” the Captain explained. “It would destroy the planet. Those gamma rays would cook them all alive.” 

“More importantly, we have another one to protect,” the Doctor pointed out. “I think you’re partial to it? Sol 3? The Earth?”

Rory nodded after a moment. “Right.”

But Amy waved her finger in the Doctor’s face. “Protect it from what?”

“Just watch, Pond.” The Doctor plugged his screwdriver into the console. He tapped a few keys in the typewriter and loaded the last data he’d recorded on his sonic. Purple, skeletal faces filled the screen. 

“We’ve seen them before. And then we’ve forgotten,” the Doctor explained as his companions drew a collective breath, suddenly shocked and nauseous. “It’s time we studied them. We’ll have to count them, and capture them on Earth.” 

Quickly, he explained. They would mark on their own skin to count the creatures they saw. They would train themselves to remember them. The Doctor looked back and forth between Amy and Rory as he talked, as he quizzed them, and pestered them to remember. Already they were forgetting what they’d seen on that planet. 

Jack watched, feeling more and more separated from the conversation, until he realized that he wasn’t going to be part of their new project. 

He lingered behind, as Rory and Amy went to their rooms to study the footage. “Doctor,” he said softly, “Time to take me home, isn’t it?”

The Doctor paused, his hands hovering on the Tardis console. “The world is going to need you, too, Captain. Believe it or not.”

“Again?” Jack looked up at the bright console of the Tardis, rising and falling in its cycles, constantly regenerating itself. He’d thought for a long time he was done being needed. It was so much easier, being missing, being lost. Being just another traveler on the long road. It was the Doctor who always grounded him and gave him purpose.

“You don’t think you can, but you’ll manage.” The Doctor managed a smile that looked a little too forced. And then he nodded toward Crow, who was sitting on the steps with his head in his hands. “Think you can arrange a ticket to the States, for our newest time traveler?”

Jack looked over to the confused, sick American. “It’s a Retcon case if I ever saw one.”

“Normally I don’t condone that,” said the Doctor. And then he adjusted some levers, and they were off, flying through time and back toward Sol 3. 

Jack held on tight to the railing, threw his head back and laughed. He would never tire of the sound of the Tardis wheezing through the Vortex and the thrill of riding in the best time machine in the universe. And best, the Doctor was laughing with him with his bright, clever eyes.


	11. Epilogue

_July 1969, Valley of the Gods, Utah_

Amy was running. The flat, rocky path stretched out in front and behind her for miles. The valley was covered in brown tumbleweeds and green sagebrush, and red stone mesas loomed above her, squatting in the valley like lazy gods. Her quick breaths burned in her chest and her stomach clenched, as she grew tired and kept running anyway. She’d climbed out of a cavern infested with Silents but she couldn’t stop to catch her breath now. She could hear the chugging motors behind them. Canton Delaware Everett III and his goons were gunning them down. The American government, once again, was out to capture anything it couldn’t understand. And for now, that included Amy and Rory and the Doctor—

 

_1960\. Glen Canyon Dam, Arizona_

Rory was running. The noise of his footsteps echoed over the cavern of the Glen Canyon Dam, but the road was smooth and solid beneath his trainers. He’d almost forgotten Utah and the Doctor, dying in front of their eyes. And then they’d landed, and spread out to gather as much information as they could about the Silence. And now, they were being hunted. 

 

_6852, Gamma Forest_

“Please don’t fail me,” the little girl begged, as she ripped the watch off her arm and pressed it to the cave console she’d found in the meadow, just as the Doctor had told her.

Outside, she could hear the Silents wheezing, and the whirr of the lizard’s machinery. They were coming for her. They were always coming for her, but she couldn’t hide any longer. There was yelling and gunshots. And above it all, Madame Kovarian’s voice, calling for her. “Child! Tick, tock, goes the clock!” 

Her hands burned against the console as the watch heated up. River shut her eyes and ignored the smoke rising from her fingers. She could feel the universe opening, and Madame’s voice was gone. Then she was in a space that time orbited around. She could feel the voices in the Time Vortex, and quickly reminded herself to focus. The Doctor had given her numbers to ask it for. Numbers that represented a place and a time. She mumbled them over and over, and then as the whirr of the machinery filled her ears, she shouted them louder and louder, trying to hear herself.

Then her Tardis swerved, and something went haywire, and she was landing in the wrong place. Madame Kovarian and her lizard scientists had lost control of all that energy blasting toward the Gamma planet. It was causing interference, getting in the way. The Tardis couldn’t concentrate around it and was spun out of control. She held her breath, “Please find the Doctor!” she asked it, over and over again.

When the cave went cold, River pried open one eye after the other and terrified, stepped out of the Tardis to see where she’d landed. She knew without looking that the crystal heart of the Tardis was dead and wouldn’t fly again. 

She was in a dark, hot and musty warehouse with a stone floor and tall metal roof. Hovering around a console of their own were another troupe of Silents. 

She hadn’t escaped at all, just traded one prison for another. She couldn’t help herself. She shrieked.

They turned to her with their long, bony fingers outstretched. As they stepped toward her, so did another creature. A white, bulky person with a black globe for a head was reaching out its arms. 

There wasn’t anywhere to run, because she was stuck in this warehouse and the skeletons were surrounding her. As the little girl screamed, the space suit ate her up.

 

_5149, Stormcage Containment Facility_

Jack’s heavy boots echoed and thundered on the metal grating in the corridor. He found River standing at the entrance to her cell, waiting with wild hair and a devastating smile. “I knew it was you,” she said, “He’s much lighter on his feet.” 

Jack swallowed, and set to work on the door.

“So, he sent you, then? Where will you take me this time, Captain?”

“New York,” Jack answered. “1969.”

“And then?” she asked, as the sirens blared and they ran for the door.

“I can’t tell you where I’m going.”

“You never do.” She laughed, as they stood on the hangar deck and rain poured all around them. “Such a mystery, you are. I suppose that’s the way he likes it?”

Finally Jack met her eyes and smiled. “You know, I never thought of it that way.”

He took her hand, and punched a few buttons on her wrist strap, and they both vanished through the Vortex.


End file.
